An artist using Midjourney to create AI-generated art won first place at Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition, leading to criticism by other artists (Matthew Gault/VICE)

Matthew Gault / VICE:
The DHS has awarded a ~$700K grant to researchers to develop best practices and resources for monitoring and evaluating extremist activities in game communities  —  Several groups are coming together to study the little understood phenomenon.  —  Matthew Gault

Dan Bilefsky / New York Times:
The Metropolitan Opera restarts processing ticket orders, nine days after a suspected ransomware attack took its website offline and paralyzed its box office  —  Hackers had left the Met, the largest performing arts organization in the United States, unable to sell tickets as it tries to recover from the pandemic.

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica:
A New York-based artist received copyright registration on a comic featuring artwork by Midjourney, the first known US copyright for latent diffusion AI art  —  Registration of AI-assisted comic comes amid fierce online debate about AI art ethics.  —  In what might be a first …

John Herrman / New York Magazine:
An in-depth look at AI image-creation tools like Imagen, DALL-E 2, and Midjourney; Midjourney users are making concept art for clients and using stock art less  —  How we work — even think — changes when we can instantly command convincing images into existence.

Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
Artists say they risk losing income as people use their names as distinctive style prompts in text-to-image AI art generators for commercial purposes  —  Greg Rutkowski is a more popular prompt than Picasso.  —  Those cool AI-generated images you’ve seen across the internet?

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica:
DeviantArt announces DreamUp, a text-to-image generator based on Stable Diffusion, drawing intense criticism from its artist community  —  Confused artists discover their work will be used for AI training by default.  —  On Friday, the online art community DeviantArt announced DreamUp …