NEW YORK â Christieâs has launched its first sale dedicated to artworks created with artificial intelligence (AI), riding the AI revolution wave. But the move by the famed auction house has sparked anger among some artists.
The sale, titled Augmented Intelligence, features about 20 pieces and runs online until March 5.
Christieâs, like its rival Sothebyâs, has previously offered AI-created items but had never devoted an entire sale to this medium.
âAI has become more prolific in everybodyâs daily lives,â said Ms Nicole Sales Giles, Christieâs head of digital art sales. âMore people understand the process and the technology behind AI and so are more readily able to appreciate AI also in creative fields.â
The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 transformed public perceptions of generative AI and opened new possibilities for its widespread use.
The market is now crowded with AI models that allow users to generate drawings, animated images or photo-realistic images through simple natural language requests.
The use of algorithms in the art world, it turns out, is almost as old as modern computing itself.
Christieâs is offering a work by American artist Charles Csuri dating from 1966. As a pioneer of computer art, Csuri, who died in February 2022 aged 99, distinguished himself by using software to distort one of his hand-drawn sketches.
âAll artists in the fine art sense, and particularly the artists that were featured in this auction, use AI to supplement their existing practices,â said Ms Sales Giles.
The collection up for sale includes paintings, sculptures, photographs and giant screens displaying entirely digital works.
Among the saleâs highlights is Emerging Faces â estimated to sell for up to US$250,000 (S$333,000) â by American artist Pindar Van Arman, a series of nine paintings resulting from a âconversationâ between two AI models.
The first model paints a face on canvas, while the second stops it when it recognises a human form.
The sale has not been welcomed by all, and an online petition calling for its cancellation has gathered more than 6,400 signatures. Many of the submitted works âwere created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a licenceâ, it says.
The petition says the sale contributes to the âmass theft of human artistsâ workâ.
Several artists filed lawsuits in 2023 against generative AI start-ups, including popular platforms Midjourney and Stability AI, accusing them of violating intellectual property laws.
Digital art heavyweight Refik Anadol, who is taking part in the event with his animated creation Machine Hallucinations, defended the sale on X, saying the âmajority of the artists in the project (are) specifically pushing and using their own datasets plus their own modelsâ.
Petition signatory and illustrator Reid Southen said that at a minimum, pieces should be excluded that do not use the artistâs own software or data â accounting for perhaps one-third of the sale.
âIf these were oil paintings,â he said, and there âwas a strong likelihood that many of them were either counterfeit or forgeries or stolen or unethical in some way, I donât believe it would be ethical for Christie to continue the auctionâ.
Ms Sales Giles responded: âIâm not a copyright lawyer, so I canât comment on the legality specifically. But the idea that artists have been looking at prior artists to influence their current work is not new.â
âEvery new artistic movement generates controversy and criticism,â she added.
âMidjourney is trained on basically the entirety of the internet,â said noted Turkish artist Sarp Kerem Yavuz, who used the software to create Hayal, also being auctioned at Christieâs. âThereâs so much information (out there) that you cannot infringe on individual copyright.â
Southen, the illustrator, pushed back. âThatâs essentially arguing that itâs bad to steal from one or two people, but itâs okay to steal from millions of people, right?â he said. AFP
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