Thousands of artists are urging the auction house Christie’s to cancel a sale of art created with artificial intelligence, claiming the technology behind the works is committing “mass theft”.
The Augmented Intelligence auction has been described by Christie’s as the first AI-dedicated sale by a major auctioneer and features 20 lots with prices ranging from $10,000 to $250,000 for works by artists including Refik Anadol and the late AI art pioneer Harold Cohen.
It’s not any of those reasons, it’s because it can only exist by being trained on human authored art and in many cases you can extract a decentish copy of the original if you can specify enough tags that piece was labelled with.
The ai model is a lossy database of art and using them to launder copyright violations should be illegal, is immorally stealing from the creator, and chills future artists by taking away the revenue they need while learning. This leads to ai model art having not enough future work to train on and the stagnation of the human experience as making beautiful things is not profitable enough, or doesn’t give the profit to those with power.
I did close my post by saying capitalism is responsible for the problems, so I think we’re on the same page about why it’s unethical to engage with AI art.
I am interested in engaging in a discourse not about that (I am very firmly against the proliferation of AI because of the many and varied bad social implications), but I am interested in working on building better arguments against it.
I have seen multiple people across the web making the argument that AI art is bad not just because of the fact that it will put artists out of work, but because the product is, itself, lacking in some vital and unnameable human spark or soul. Which is a bad argument, since it means the argument becomes about esoteric philosophy and not the practical argument that if we do nothing art stops being professionally viable, killing many people and also crushing something beautiful and wonderful about life forever.
Rich people ruin everything, is what I want the argument to be.
So I’m really glad you’re making that argument! Thanks, honestly, it’s great to see it!
The soul thing is very poor ground to argue on yes which is why I immediately spent the time to make a different one :)
At very best it’s an intuitive understanding of “procedural oatmeal” where the brain spots patterns in the output so quickly it becomes tired of the art and loses interest.
But I think that’s being generous and I think of lot of the time it’s a purely to stake a position based on identity and a challenge to that identity.
Of course! I didn’t mean to suggest you are arguing about the soul thing. I’m sorry if that’s the impression I created, since you’ve been very clearly arguing on a very different tract that I firmly agree with.
Oh dear no I’m repying to agree. It is all good.
It’s a lazy Sunday and while I have a dozen better things to do trying to make clear posts about ai in a place where people will agree intelligently is a nice waste of time.