“This isn’t going to stop. Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. has won. Humans lost.”

Jason M. Allen — speaking to a reporter after winning $300 at a State Fair art competition, for a piece he created using text-to-image software, enabled by robots scraping images — and their text alternatives — off the worldwide web. When asked, Jason declined to reveal the words he used to materialize his work of art. He insisted, a bit defensively, “I won. I’m not going to apologize for it, and I didn’t break any rules.”

I tried the latest artificial-intelligence engine, touted as leading-edge technology. The operator enters text; out comes a selection of images purported to conform to — and express the sense of — the selected words. I threw a fastball at the algorithm machine: “catherine the great in buckskin.”

I choose to share the most photo-realistic version from an array of four images. It leaves me unsettled and dissatisfied. Ekaterina’s dress looks as if fashioned from copper sheet-metal, not buckskin. She holds her body like a queen; her breast and neck look fairly lifelike, but she is bald, and has the ruined eyes of an acid-attack victim. The Czarina has an apparatus (we are not sure what else to call it) hooked over her ears extending around the back of her head; the thing stiffly falls without dynamism across her shoulders. The picture seems a bizarre conglomeration of bits and pieces, and lives up to the term: “scrapings.”

Evangelical promoters of text-to-image applications like this one make the following prediction: A similar fabricated intelligence (in its advanced form) will give birth to a total substitute for Reality. The world where we currently live and breathe and locate our Being will lose its profound significance; it will become the Actuality we formerly called Home. The degradation and re-arrangement of matter and energy in our bodies will also yield to the logic of these priestly engineers:

• Every technical problem has a technical solution.
• Death is a technical problem.
• Therefore, death will be eliminated through technological (engineering) means.

If you accept the first two lines of this syllogism are true, you arrive at a triumphal deduction: Immortality, the age-old dream-wish of Homo sapiens could be just around the corner. Give — for example Google Corporation — enough time and money and its scientists will conquer our ancient nemeses: Dissolution arriving at Non-being.

Not everyone is besotted; many people affected by this invention distrust fervor and messianic audacity. The invention and steady improvement of the text-to-image systems has created a cantankerous backlash among aesthetes and creators of traditional art. Some are banning these creations from image-sharing platforms altogether, citing “inadequate human input.” As one website supervisor expressed it — in my paraphrase:

“It is trivial for anyone to make art using these art-generating machine algorithms. This requires no investment in skill or time. These images should not crowd out the true artists amongst us and devalue those who have invested so much time in their artistic pursuits.”

Indeed, a kindergarten student in less than a minute, possessing just three words of written language — having only rudimentary eye-hand coordination — might toss off a masterpiece, without getting down and dirty with the usual finger-paints or modeling-clay.

Mr. Allen (quoted at the top) used a program of this kind to create his winning entry, entitled: Theater D’ Opera Spatial (Space-Opera), a hazy fantasy image with figures in the foreground resembling opera singers. In the background we find an enormous circular window through which a seemingly divine light shines. Perhaps inspired by that celestial glow, Jason spoke of spiritual things: “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I felt like it was demonically inspired — like some otherworldly force was involved.”

Not only has Mr. Allen become a prize-winning algorithmic artist, he shows signs of becoming a Prophet for the coming Age Of Incorporeal Reality (or: Incorporeality).

Can we have art without aesthetic choices made by embodied, sentient beings?

A Frankenstein of a question — without precedent, nevertheless that contingency has topped the horizon and is bearing straight down upon us.

The words I typed to bring forth this pretty picture:

“a moonlit winter scene including mountains and a lake.”