Winning Christmas Poster Pulled Over Artificial Intelligence Accusations In Bozeman

BOZEMAN, Mont. — What began as a small-town art contest to create a poster for a beloved holiday tradition has snowballed into an avalanche of controversy and media attention for the contest’s winner.  

The 45th Annual Christmas Stroll poster competition in Bozeman offered a modest $200 prize. It ended with accusations, investigations, online harassment, and a decision by the Downtown Bozeman Partnership to pull the winning design entirely citing safety concerns.

The winner, artist Ghassane Moutaoukil, has steadfastly denied using AI to generate his illustration of revelers beneath Christmas lights on a wintry Bozeman street.

At the same time, local artists claim they could replicate his style using ChatGPT. 

A Bozeman art studio posted an analysis titled "How to spot AI art," and social media erupted.

"The real-life humans behind this selection process are subject to error," Downtown Bozeman acknowledged in a statement before announcing the poster would be replaced with a photo of the city's beloved holiday spiders — the nickname given to the big strings of lights hung over Main Street. 

The controversy, dubbed "artgate" by locals on social media, has drawn coverage from national news outlets and sparked conversations that echo across Wyoming as well. 

Plagiarism Machine?

The Bozeman AI poster blowup arrives as major creative voices are drawing lines in the sand over AI-generated content.

Vince Gilligan, the acclaimed creator of "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul," has described artificial intelligence as "the world's most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine."

His new show "Pluribus" carries a pointed message in its credits: "This show was made by humans."

The irreplaceable value of the human imagination is something that inspires Caitlin Addlesperger, president and executive director of the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, one of the nation's premier artist residency programs.

"Our mission is to provide working artists with time and space to focus on the creative process," Addlesperger told Cowboy State Daily.

The foundation hosts up to 10 artists at a time — visual artists, writers, composers and choreographers — thoughtfully picked from a sizable pool of applicants.

None of the recently selected residents have clearly used AI as a tool in their work, said Addlesperger. 

"Art is here to bring us together and connect us to our shared humanity," Addlesperger said. "And I don't see a place with artificial intelligence as part of that."

Her concern goes to the heart of what makes art meaningful for many. 

"Our whole mission is dedicated to the creative spirit and the creative process," she said. "It's not about the product. AI is like you're skipping a step of that creative process and going straight to the product. At Ucross, we're about that middle ground, that creative process, because that's where the magic is."

Addlesperger said she's found herself emotionally conflicted when encountering AI-generated work.

"I'm more interested in what humans create. I'm not interested in what a computer will create — that doesn't move me," she said. "If I find I've been moved by some kind of AI video or picture, I get almost angry. Like I've been tricked, because it's not to me the spirit of the artwork — meeting the spirit."

Still, she acknowledged the complexity of the moment.

"I don't think it's a black and white issue. We're still in that really, really nuanced gray area," she said.

The Bozeman controversy, she noted, illustrates how difficult these questions have become. 

"How can you even prove this about a person?" she asked. "How can they know?"

Trolling AI Image

The controversial Christmas Stroll poster shows a crowd watching the lighting of the Christmas Spiders in front of the Baxter Hotel. As buzz around the poster grew online and in social media, the manager of the local record store got an idea that made him laugh. 

Dennis Miller Jr., at Cactus Records in Bozeman, watched the controversy unfold with a mix of amusement and inspiration.

"You cannot live in the area and not know what was going on," Miller said, describing the amount of chatter about this poster. "My girlfriend and I, at night, we'd check on the stories and it was just blowing up.

"I was thinking about how ridiculous the whole thing had gotten," he said. "It'd be really funny if we could get some kind of piggyback on the hype and the buzz of everything and make a joke out of it."

Miller fed the controversial poster image into ChatGPT, swapped in photos of the record store, and created a satirical version promoting Cactus Records. He then created a social media post with the parody poster and Gary Numan's 1979 song “M.E." — a pointed musical choice.

"It's about an artificial intelligence that wipes out all mankind and becomes sad and alone because he's all by himself at the end of the day," Miller explained

The parody spread quickly online, with some people getting the joke and others missing the point entirely.

"Some people were a little offended, like, 'How could Cactus Records do this?'" Miller said. "Not realizing that's the joke. We're a part of the problem now."

Miller’s satire possibly triggered imitators, like someone in Livingston who created their own parody version for that town’s Christmas Stroll. 

When asked if Cactus Records would stock music created exclusively by artificial intelligence, Miller was resolute.

"I wouldn't feel comfortable," he said, weighing whether a record store should ever not sell a hit record. "Is the bottom line worth more than your morals and your beliefs?"

As for the next poster contest open to local Bozeman artists, "If there's a committee behind something, there's so many great artists here, just really put some thought into it.”

Certified Authentic

Ralph Wiegmann has been making art in Montana for decades. A working contemporary artist in Bozeman whose pieces hang in local and regional galleries, his entire profession is built on something AI cannot replicate: the marvelous process by which inspiration forms in a human mind and travels through human hands onto canvas, clay, paper and other materials outside the reach of AI. 

“I'm not sure I would be able to pose it as a right or a wrong,” said Wiegmann about AI. “I would just pose it as like, ‘Well, this is what it used to be, and this is what it is now.’"

In other words, AI is here and artists are faced with new choices. 

Wiegmann remains focused on creating interesting new work by hand as he always has and was taught to do. 

“You sat in your studio, you conjured something up. It came. It was an ephemeral thing that you're trying to describe, whether you're seeing something or there's a voice in your head,” Wiegmann told Cowboy State Daily. “It's an ephemeral thing.”

With AI, Wiegmann said we’re seeing that time-honored process fabricated at warp speed by AI. 

“You as a single person are making art. You're basing it on your entire universe that's your life experience,” he said. “Well, now you're asking the computer to do it.”

He said AI tries to replicate a person’s creative thought process, “But they're tapped into like, trillions of times the information.” 

A Community Reckons

The Downtown Bozeman Partnership announced that this year's Christmas Stroll — scheduled for Dec. 6 — will be advertised with a photograph of the Holiday Spiders that have become a beloved fixture of the event. 

Downtown Bozeman acknowledged it has no parameters around AI in current contest guidelines and plans to establish standards for navigating AI submissions going forward, including requiring artists to provide working files.

Art competitions in Wyoming must also deal with AI as image generating tools proliferate online. 

Travis Goodman, co-founder of Jackson Hole Still Works, runs the Spirit of Wyoming bottle label art contest, now in its tenth year. The competition awards $2,500 to a Wyoming artist whose work will grace the distillery's vodka bottles for a full year.

Goodman said he hadn't heard about the Bozeman scandal, but the issues it raises are ones his competition has inadvertently designed around.

"It's not computer artwork," Goodman said of what they're looking for. "It's human tactile manufacturing."

The contest requires artists to submit not just their entry piece, but six or seven additional portfolio works — a safeguard that helps the judges verify they're dealing with a working artist, not someone who generated a one-off image.

"We want to support professional artists and bring them to the forefront and help them grow their careers," Goodman said. 

The portfolio requirement creates another layer of protection as judges can compare styles across multiple works.

"There's a level of consistency in style that we can recognize authenticity," Goodman told Cowboy State Daily. "Authenticity is like the number one game when it comes to our products and therefore the images that we are going to allow to represent our products."

Here’s another safeguard: The eight finalists must deliver their original, physical artwork to Jackson Hole Still Works, where Goodman personally handles every piece.

"You can't AI the stroke of a paintbrush, right?" he said.

If significant AI influence were detected in a submission, Goodman said, the work would be disqualified.

"That's not who we are," he explained, emphasizing the localness of their vodka. “We make it ourselves, from scratch. And that's what we want our artists to represent as well."

The Christmas Stroll takes place Dec. 6 in downtown Bozeman. The Spirit of Wyoming art contest accepts submissions through Jan. 12, 2026. 

David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.