BOZEMAN — Is it AI or not? That’s what many people are wondering after the Downtown Business Association announced the winner of this year’s Christmas Stroll poster contest.
After the reveal, some on social media accused the winning design of being created by artificial intelligence.
In response, the Downtown Business Association posted on Facebook, quoting the artist: “The artwork was fully hand-rendered, starting with my own pencil sketch, and then I developed it digitally.”
The association said it currently does not have contest guidelines regarding AI-generated art but plans to implement them moving forward.
The Downtown Business Association’s full response, which can be found on their Facebook page, is quoted here:
"At the time of the Christmas Stroll Poster selection, Ghassane provided us with his bio and a description of his creation process.
Ghassane is a graduate of MSU and has been featured in Sweet Pea Festival and Bozeman Magazine. He is an active member of the Bozeman art community and has received various accolades including being an Adobe Design Achievement Award Semifinalist. Ghassane mentioned that he hand-renders his images and inputs them into Adobe Illustrator: “The artwork was fully hand-rendered, starting with my own pencil sketch, and then I developed it digitally using my illustration techniques. After that, the piece was finalized entirely in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, where I refined the line work, textures, color palette, shapes, and composition.”
With that information, Ghassane was selected as the winner.
Ghassane is currently out of town; we asked him to send a photo of himself holding a placeholder, and overlayed the final mockup from our graphics team (poorly through Canva, we will admit!).
The real-life humans behind this selection process are subject to error - as anyone is! From these responses, we can glean that the possibility of AI-generated art is a huge concern. We currently do not parameters around AI in our contest guidelines. Moving forward, we plan to establish standards for navigating AI submissions as well as requiring the artist’s working files.
We see the community's passion, we hear your concerns, and we echo the love for local artists. We sincerely encourage local artists to apply to future Calls For Art that occur in Bozeman!
We hope to share the joy of the holidays with you at the upcoming 45th Annual Christmas Stroll.
All our love and respect."
