7d ago

‘Mass theft’: Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled

www.theguardian.com ‘Mass theft’: Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled

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.

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I'm going to say it again. It cannot be theft. Nothing is stolen. What did they have before they don't have now?
I see people disagree with me but they are too lame to try and say why, and they definitely could not explain how, when there is nothing in AI but a probability algorithm.
- If artists were compensated for their art being fed through the AI to feed the algorithm, sure. They are not. It's not too dissimilar from our comments and data being farmed to better other LLMs and that is intellectual theft as well.
  
  I could have that discussion. But it still wouldn't be theft. Nothing was actually stolen.
  
  This easily results in humans having to pay licensing fees just to look at art, because humans also use past context
  What is creativity? It's nothing but what you have learned plus neural noise. If we try this Luddite dogmatic nonsense we'd have to kill human art as well, fucking THINK MARK, THINK!
  
  I'm trying to square away what the difference is between this and George RR Martin reading Homer and Tolkien and others and then producing A Song of Ice and Fire..
- My understanding of AI art models is shakey at best but I think I remember that it basically uses the images to create a static (Litteral static like old school TV screen snow kinda) static model based on the image. Then it extrapolate based on 1000s of such static sudo images to create the original work. On a small scale I don't think of it as theft. It's not unlike a person using their past knowledge of image concepts to create a new image. Everyone hates AI though.
- I can agree with downloading and sharing movies and media from the internet not beeing theft.
  
  Even then it would be a copy. In this case it would be like downloading an amalgam of thousands of movies, not quite like any of them
- When someone makes use of a service and doesn't pay afterwards that is considered to be theft even if the provider hasn't been deprived on anything. For example, if I snuck into an art gallery without paying I won't remove anything tangible since the gallery's overheads and running costs were fixed long before I arrived.
  A better word would be copyright infringement if the AI is making use of other works without a license or other permission. Based on my reading of the article it appears those involved only fed the AI works in the public domain or works that they had created themselves. The letter of complaint appears to be signed by artists who are unaware of these circumstances.
  
  Even in your latter paragraph, it wouldn't be an infringement. Assuming the art was lawfully accessed in the first place, like by clicking a link to a publicly shared portfolio, no copy is being encoded into the model. There is currently no intellectual property right invoked merely by training a model-- if people want there to be, and it isn't an unreasonable thing to want (though I don't agree it's good policy), then a new type of intellectual property right will need to be created.
  What's actually baffling to me is that these pieces presumably are all effectively public domain as they're authored by AI. And they're clearly digital in nature, so wtf are people actually buying?
  
  There are cases progressing through the courts. If the courts rule that copyright has been violated by the AIs under current laws then we won't need to create a new offense or expand IP laws currently on the books.
  wtf are people actually buying
  A unique work of art I guess since it's unlikely anyone would be able to replicate the prompt in order to get the same results.
  
  It could of course go up to the scotus and effectively a new right be legislated from the bench, but it is unlikely and the nature of these models in combination with what is considered a copy under the rubric copyright in the US has operated effectively forever means that merely training and deploying a model is almost certainly not copyright infringement. This is pretty common consensus among IP attorneys.
  That said, a lot of other very obvious infringement in coming out in discovery in many of these cases. Like torrenting all the training data. THAT is absolutely an infringement but is effectively unrelated to the question of whether lawfully accessed content being used as training data retroactively makes its access unlawful (it really almost certainly doesn't).

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