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.
AI is a red herring, in my opinion.
Some artists have spent over a century trying to one-up each other to the bottom, starting with Dadaism and even before that (anyone remember Salieri’s populist operettas?). It’s got to a point, where a black square on a canvas, or a banana taped to a wall, got called “art”.
Other artists, have been trying to transmit emotions and feelings through their work, using whatever tools at their disposal. Be it through words, paints, shapes, interactions, etc. With more or less success, but they’ve been trying.
An AI is another tool, like a camera is a tool, a brush is a tool, a chisel is a tool, a keyboard/typewriter is a tool, and so on. People can use their tools to produce low effort trash… or they can put effort and thought into what they want to transmit.
Good AI art, takes the same or more effort as good non-AI art, to make the AI produce what the artist intends. Retouching parts of the output, either with more AI or some other tools, refining or retraining the whole model, creating complex prompts to make the tool output something closer to the artist’s vision. That vision, is the core of the art.
Low effort AI art, is mindless theft, no dispute there, good for quick memes and little more.
Thoughtful AI art, is a conversation between an artist, and a tool with massive experience in observing other’s art, in order to extract the essence of what they can apply to their own. An AI works best as a brain extension, capable of reading all the books, seeing all the paintings and photos, watching all the movies, listening to all the sounds and songs, way beyond what’s possible in a single human lifespan. Then it’s the artist’s job to sift through that.
Focusing on just the “AI” part, does a disservice to the whole art community. Focus on the person instead… and if they’ve put no effort, then go ahead, feel free to laugh at the “art”, no matter which tools they’ve used… unless they admit to be still learning, in which case some encouragement and tips might be a better way.
chisels, brushes, and cameras don’t train on the existing work of humans and then “create” art. they are actual tools. ai is not able to do anything without training on and directly taking from the work of others.
if i’m inspired by dalí and rothko i can make work that references them, or even steals from them but my hand is also undeniably involved. ai is not inspired by works, it is trained on them for the purpose of copying. it’s stealing in the laziest possible way and can’t possibly include the hand of the maker because there isn’t one.
Under this logic you should pay royalties to the maker of your brush and the teachers who taught you. Maybe not everything is about owning shit.
I mean typically you buy the brushes and pay for the teaching one way or the other. AI isn’t paying any artist for training upon their work.
Who do you think has paid artists throughout history?
(Patrons is the answer)
There are three things to unpack there:
Tools don’t create art, neural networks wielding those tools create art.
Right now, human NNs are the most complex around the block, so our anthropocentric egotism tries to gatekeep art to humans… ignoring all the animal art out there, like for example birds building “beautiful” nests to attract mates (beautiful to each other, not necessarily to humans), all the art going on between fish, cephalopods, dolphins, whale songs, etc. There is also no guarantee that human NNs will remain supreme forever… and what then, will humans stop creating art, or will the ant tell the elephant that its art is not a thing?
Tools DO use existing human work, otherwise city photography could never be art, cultural photography could not be art, definitely a Campbell soup can could never be art… and so on. The Camera obscura has been used to “cheat” at art since possibly the paleolithic, then extensively “abused” by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci to copy both natural and human works.
Modern AI does way more than “copying”, it abstracts the underlying patterns, then integrates those abstractions with a prompt, to “make up” an output. Sometimes the output of the abstraction of an “A” looks like an “A”, other times it doesn’t. People keep putting AI down for “hallucinating”… but you can’t claim that it “hallucinates” and “copies” in the same sentence.
For an intro on how modern AIs work, I’d suggest checking: Neural Networks, by 3Blue1Brown
AIs have not been “copying” for several decades already, modern AIs are even farther away from that, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.