Sarah Swan, an arts writer based in Yellowknife, has won gold at the Alberta Magazine Awards for an essay she wrote for Galleries West magazine about making art with Artificial Intelligence.
Swan's essay, You Want it Darker?, follows her experiments with fast-growing new AI technology and reveals how gruesome some of its imagery can be.
"I sat in front of my screen late into the night watching demon after demon appear in hyper-realistic detail – wizened, mottled, malicious," she writes. "Scarier still were the vacant-eyed beings. I was unnerved. Why do so many users want to conjure nightmares rather than dreams?"
The awards are organized by the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association to honour outstanding work by magazine writers and visual creators.
Galleries West had four other nominations:
- Sara Swan, feature writing short, for Jerry Saltz: Art is Life.
- Shazia Hafiz Ramji, emerging writer, for Gailan Ngan.
- Mark Mushet, digital presence, for Vilhelm Sundin.
- Tom Tait and Portia Priegert, digital presence, for the Galleries West website.
For more information on the awards, go here.