GAN Artwork Won First Place at State Fair Competition

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms (Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

• Colorado AI Act Colorado (United States) · Repealed · binding
• Framework Convention on AI (CETS 225) Council of Europe · Adopted · binding
• India DPDP Act India · Partially applicable · binding
• Law on Artificial Intelligence (2025) Kazakhstan · Adopted · binding
• Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence Italy · In force · binding

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (1)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

1. 31 Aug 2022
   An AI-Generated Artwork Won First Place at a State Fair Fine Arts Competition, and Artists Are Pissed

   vice.com · Matthew Gault

Who was involved

Alleged deployer

Jason Allen

Alleged developer

Midjourney

Alleged harmed party

Artists Submitting In The Digital Arts Category, Digital Artists, Artists

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Risk domain

Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms

Risk subdomain

6.3 Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort

Causal entity

Human

Intent

Intentional

Timing

Post-deployment

Harm level

—

Sectors

—

Countries

—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 6.3.

• Cultural dispossession

  "Cultural dispossession - Intentional and/or unintentional erasure of cultural goods and values, such as ways of speaking, expressing humour, or sounds and voices that contribute to a cultural identity, or their inapprop...

  A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

• Loss of creativity/critical thinking

  "Loss of creativity/critical thinking - Devaluation and/or deterioration of human creativity, artistic ex- pression, imagination, critical thinking or problem-solving skills."

  A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

• Copyright infringement

  "The use of large amounts of copyrighted data for training general- purpose AI models poses a challenge to traditional intellectual property laws, and to systems of consent, compensation, and control over data. The use o...

  International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

• Risks of copyright infringement

  "The use of vast amounts of data for training general- purpose AI models has caused concerns related to data rights and intellectual property. Data collection and content generation can implicate a variety of data rights...

  International AI Safety Report 2025 (Bengio2025)

• Copyright Violation

  "LLM systems may output content similar to existing works, infringing on copyright owners."

  Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

• Intellectual property rights violations

  "This is an emerging category, with more cases prone to appear as the use of generative AI tools–such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, or ChatGPT–becomes more widespread. Some content creators are already suing for the a...

  Navigating the Landscape of AI Ethics and Responsibility (Cunha2023)

• Impact on Intellectual Property Rights

  "The extent and effectiveness of legal protections for intellectual property have been thrown into question with the rise of generative AI. Generative AI trains itself on vast pools of data that often include IP-protecte...

  Generating Harms - Generative AI's impact and paths forwards (EPIC2023)

• Copyright challenges (copyright-infringing output)

  "Even though models generally create new outputs, it is possible that the content produced by a generative AI tool—such as an image, or even computer code— could turn out to be almost identical to that used in the traini...

  Regulating under Uncertainty: Governance Options for Generative AI (G'sell2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

• 13 Feb 2026Seedance 2.0 Reportedly Generated Viral Tom Cruise–Brad Pitt Fight Video, Prompting Hollywood IP and Likeness Complaints
• 5 Dec 2025The New York Times Sued Perplexity for Allegedly Using Copyrighted Content and Generating False Attributions
• 17 Nov 2025Reported Disqualification of Two Books from the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Due to Alleged AI-Generated Cover Art
• 9 Jan 2024Unauthorized AI Impersonation of George Carlin Used in Comedy Special