Letter says many of works being sold by Christie’s are made by AI models trained on pieces by human artists, without a licence

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.

  • Zaleramancer@beehaw.org
    1·
    3 days ago

    Hey, thank you so much for your contribution to this discussion. You presented me a really challenging thought and I have appreciated grappling with it for a few days. I think you’ve really shifted some bits of my perspective, and I think I understand now.

    I think there’s an ambiguity in my initial post here, and I wanted to check which of the following is the thing you read from it:

    • Generative AI art is inherently limited in these ways, even in the hands of skilled artists or those with technical expertise with it; or,
    • Generative AI art is inherently limited in these ways, because it will be ultimately used by souless executives who don’t respect or understand art.
    • barsoap@lemm.ee
      2·
      2 days ago

      Both are in there, and neither of those are wrong. Generative AI does have serious limitations when it comes to detail control, and it’s also used a lot by people (not necessarily executives) who don’t respect or understand art – even to create things that they then consider art.

      The thing is that we’ve had the same discussion back when photography became a thing. Ultimately what it did was free the art of painting from the shackles of having to do portraits.

      One additional thing is that I recommend extremely against trying to try and develop art skills by generating AI. Buy pencil and paper, buy a graphics tablet, open Krita or Blender, go through a couple of tutorials for a few days you’ll have learned more about what you need to know to judge AI output than what hitting generate could teach you in a year. How do I know that the eyes in that AI painting have an off-kilter perspective? Because, for the life of me, I can’t draw them straight either, but put enough hours into drawing to look at both the big picture and minute detail. One of the reasons I switched to sculpting.