The annual Christmas Stroll poster competition in Bozeman, Montana, is not a high-stakes affair. Residents submit festive designs advertising the city’s Christmas market. The prize is $200.
But this year, the contest became the talk of the town. Debate has raged online for over a week: Did the winner use AI?
An uproar broke out on social media soon after the contest winner was announced this month as local artists claimed the winning illustration of Bozeman revelers on a wintry night looked like it was generated by artificial intelligence. Some claimed they were able to replicate the design on ChatGPT. Others began investigating the winner’s previous artwork, which they alleged was also suspect.
The winning artist, Ghassane Moutaoukil, denies using AI to create any of his work, which he told The Washington Post is hand-drawn.
But the backlash was severe enough that the Downtown Bozeman Association, the management company that runs the Christmas Stroll and poster competition, said Wednesday it would not print and distribute Moutaoukil’s poster due to “safety concerns of all parties involved.” Organizers are advertising the Christmas Stroll with a photo, instead.
For Bozemanites, it was an amusing — if surprisingly vitriolic — local scandal. But the tensions over AI art that sparked the controversy have roiled the art world for years. Bozeman artists said they weren’t surprised the debate resonated so strongly in their tight-knit community in the Montana forests.
“So many talented artists had entered,” said Jessie Reitan, 23, a graphic designer in Bozeman who previously won the contest. She added, “They end up kind of getting screwed over.”
Moutaoukil, who maintains his critics are wrong, declined to speak in detail about the incident but said defending himself has been stressful. Harassment aimed at him led Downtown Bozeman to choose to not distribute his poster, he said.
“I fully deny the allegations that my artwork was generated using AI,” Moutaoukil wrote in an email to The Washington Post.
In a statement on a since-deleted Instagram post on the contest winner, Downtown Bozeman said Moutaoukil is “an active member of the Bozeman art community” and had defended his artwork to the organization, but that “the real-life humans behind this selection process are subject to error.”
“From these responses, we can glean that the possibility of AI-generated art is a huge concern,” the group wrote. “We currently do not [have] 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.”
Bozeman, a mountain town tucked between ski resorts and hiking trails north of Yellowstone National Park, is protective of its active arts scene, residents said. Restaurants hang prints by local artists on their walls. A volunteer-run arts festival draws thousands of visitors every summer.
Matthew Danko, a toymaker in Bozeman, was among the entrants in the Christmas Stroll poster competition. Danko, 33, has some experience in graphic design for toy packaging and saw the contest as a chance to push his art skills, he said.
He hadn’t put too much stock in winning the competition. But he was dismayed when he saw Downtown Bozeman announce Moutaoukil’s winning design, an abstract illustration of a crowded Bozeman street with Christmas lights under a starry night.
“It struck me as AI right away,” he said.
Debbie Vetter, another graphic designer in Bozeman, also suspected the poster was AI-generated. She argued that certain qualities — the poster’s yellowish tone and fuzziness, and the inconsistencies of details like the shapes of stars and window panes — were characteristic of AI artwork.
“I just kept it to myself,” Vetter, 40, said. “Then I noticed … someone had posted on Reddit about it being AI. I’m reading through the comments realizing, ‘Oh, my gosh, I wasn’t the only one that thought this.’”
A small town scandal had kicked off. Vetter, investigating further, claimed she had been able to replicate Moutaoukil’s poster with a detailed ChatGPT prompt. Wheelhouse, a Bozeman art studio, posted an analysis of the poster titled “How to spot AI art.” Moutaoukil and Vetter gave dueling interviews to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, where Moutaoukil said “people stab you in your integrity [and] professionalism like I need to prove this.”
Moutaoukil wrote in his email to The Post that all his artwork is produced with “my own hand-drawn process the same style I have been using for more than a decade.” Downtown Bozeman said in its statement that Moutaoukil told the organization he draws his art by hand and refines it using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
Moutaoukil added that he had donated his prize money to a local nonprofit and that he understood Downtown Bozeman’s decision to not distribute his poster.
“The Bozeman Downtown Association has been very supportive toward me, and I respect their reasoning,” he wrote.
As Moutaoukil insisted his work was his own, the debate spread beyond Bozeman’s artists. Jesse Ropelato, a host for Bozeman’s local the Moose 94.7 radio station, said he didn’t think Moutaoukil’s poster was questionable at first and wrote that it was “one of the best yet.” But the criticism of the design on social media gave him pause.
“If it is AI, shame on that guy,” Ropelato said.
Danko and Reitan, who still believe Moutaoukil’s art is AI-generated, said they have long grappled with the impact of AI on the creative fields they work in. Danko is more hesitant to share artwork online, he said, out of fears his art will be used to train the AI models that others use to generate images.
Reitan said she has started to document her design process after clients accused her of using AI to produce sketches she was commissioned to draw. But she didn’t expect a controversy to erupt at home, in a local Christmas-themed poster contest.
“You would think that with it being such a community-focused local thing, that people wouldn’t be submitting AI art,” Reitan said. “But at this point, we’re in such an era of computer-generated — not to say junk, but a lot of it’s junk — that it’s happening all over the place.”
Danko and Reitan’s anxieties have been echoed by artists across the country who have complained for years that AI image generators will disrupt the livelihoods of human illustrators. Others have doubled down on the technology as a new creative tool. In 2022, an amateur artist won a fine arts competition at the Colorado State Fair with a Renaissance-style portrait generated by AI and argued that the technology was another creative tool for artists to use.
Much of the town of Bozeman disagrees. Vetter said Moutaoukil should come clean if he used AI. Danko said that if Moutaoukil’s winning entry was AI-generated, it flew in the face of Bozeman’s ethos of supporting its local businesses and artists. He’s debating whether he’ll enter the poster competition again.
“If they make it very clear from the beginning that AI art can’t be used, I would consider it,” he said.
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