Visual art in juried competition

One category prize at a state fair, judged by people who did not know how the image was made, is a thin basis for a claim about art, and the jurors said afterwards they would have awarded it anyway. The US Copyright Office refused registration in 2023 because the AI-generated portion is not human authorship, and a federal appeals court held in 2025 that a machine cannot be an author; Allen's own suit was still pending in 2026. Image-making to a brief is contested in earnest; what has not been ceded is the position of the artist as the person whose choices, name and standing are on the line.