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

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.

72 comments

  • Seriously? They're auctioning AI generated shit? Fucking seriously?? Didn't anybody learn anything from those stupid fucking nft?

    • I think a lot of people's take-away from NFTs was just that there's still a sucker born every minute, and we all need money for food. No shocker there.

  • The question about if AI art is art often fixates on some weird details that I either don't care about or I think are based on fallacious reasoning. Like, I don't like AI art as a concept and I think it's going to often be bad art (I'll get into that later), but some of the arguments I see are centered in this strangely essentialist idea that AI art is worse because of an inherent lack of humanity as a central and undifferentiated concept. That it lacks an essential spark that makes it into art. I'm a materialist, I think it's totally possible for a completely inhuman machine to make something deeply stirring and beautiful- the current trends are unlikely to reliably do that, but I don't think there's something magic about humans that means they have a monopoly on beauty, creativity or art.

    However, I think a lot of AI art is going to end up being bad. This is especially true of corporate art, and less so for individuals (especially those who already have an art background). Part of the problem is that AI art will always lack the intense level of intentionality that human-made art has, simply by the way it's currently constructed. A probabilistic algorithm that's correlating words to shapes will always lack the kind of intention in small detail that a human artist making the same piece has, because there's no reason for the small details other than either probabilistic weight or random element. I can look at a painting someone made and ask them why they picked the colors they did. I can ask why they chose the lighting, the angle, the individual elements. I can ask them why they decided to use certain techniques and not others, I can ask them about movements that they were trying to draw inspiration from or emotions they were trying to communicate.

    The reasons are personal and build on the beauty of art as a tool for communication in a deep, emotional and intimate way. A piece of AI art using the current technology can't have that, not because of some essential nature, but just because of how it works. The lighting exists as it does because it is the most common way to light things with that prompt. The colors are the most likely colors for the prompt. The facial expressions are the most common ones for that prompt. The prompt is the only thing that really derives from human intention, the only thing you can really ask about, because asking, "Hey, why did you make the shoes in this blue? Is it about the modern movement towards dull, uninteresting colors in interior decoration, because they contrast a lot with the way the rest of the scene is set up," will only ever give you the fact that the algorithm chose that.

    Sure, you can make the prompts more and more detailed to pack more and more intention in there, but there are small, individual elements of visual art that you can't dictate by writing even to a human artist. The intentionality lost means a loss of the emotional connection. It means that instead of someone speaking to you, the only thing you can reliably read from AI art is what you are like. It's only what you think.

    I'm not a visual artist, but I am a writer, and I have similar problems with LLMs as writing tools because of it. When I do proper writing, I put so much effort and focus into individual word choices. The way I phrase things transforms the meaning and impact of sentences, the same information can be conveyed so many ways to completely different focus and intended mood.

    A LLM prompt can't convey that level of intentionality, because if it did, you would just be writing it directly.

    I don't think this makes AI art (or AI writing) inherently immoral, but I do think it means it's often going to be worse as an effective tool of deep, emotional connection.

    I think AI art/writing is bad because of capitalism, which isn't an inherent factor. If we lived in fully-automated gay luxury space communism, I would have already spent years training an LLM as a next-generation oracle for tabletop-roleplaying games I like. They're great for things like that, but alas, giving them money is potentially funding the recession of arts as a profession.

    • 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.

    • A LLM prompt can’t convey that level of intentionality, because if it did, you would just be writing it directly.

      Photography, as opposed to painting, can't either. Part of the art of photography is dealing with the fact that you cannot control certain things. And yes a complete noob can get absolutely lucky and generate something absolutely stunning and meaningful by accident.

      Personally I vibe much more with definitions of art that revolve around author intentionality on the one side, and impact on the human mind on the other and AIs, so far, don't have intentionality neither can they appreciate human psychology or perception so there's really no such thing as "AI art" it's "Humans employing AI as a tool, just as they employ brushes and cameras", and the question of whether a piece created with help of AI is art or craft or slop or any combination of those is up to the human factor, no different than if you used some other tool.

      So in my mind that auction is just as valid as one that focuses on photography. There's a gazillion photographs made daily that aren't art, and those don't get auctions, just as deluges of stuff that AI generated doesn't make it to that point. It's still about that "special something" and being a materialist doesn't mean you need to reject it: It is recognised by a very material computer right there in your head. It's hard to pin down, yes, if it was easy to pin down it wouldn't be art but craft.

      • The university I went to had an unusually large art department for the state it was in, most likely because due to a ridiculous chain of events and it's unique history, it didn't have any sports teams at all.

        I spent a lot of time there, because I had (and made) a lot of friends with the art students and enjoyed the company of weird, creative people. It was fun and beautiful and had a profound effect on how I look at art, craft and the people who make it.

        I mention this because I totally disagree with you on the subject of photography. It's incredibly intentional in an entirely distinct but fundamentally related way, since you lack control over so many aspects of it- the things you can choose become all the more significant, personal and meaningful. I remember people comparing generative art and photography and it's really... Aggravating, honestly.

        The photography student I knew did a whole project as part of her final year that was a display of nude figures that did a lot of work with background, lighting, dramatic shadow and use of color, angle and deeply considered compositions. It's a lot of work!

        I don't mean here to imply you're disparaging photography in any way, or that you don't know enough about it. I can't know that, so I'm just sharing my feelings about the subject and art form.

        A lot of generative art has very similar lighting and positioning because it's drawing on stock photographs which have a very standardized format. I think there's a lot of different between that and the work someone who does photography as an art has to consider. Many of the people using generative art as tools lack the background skills that would allow them to use them properly as tools. Without that, it's hard to identify what makes a piece of visual art not work, or what needs to be changed to convey a mood or idea.

        In an ideal world, there would be no concern for loss of employment because no one would have to work to live. In that world, these tools would be a wonderful addition to the panoply of artistic implements modern artists enjoy.

    • All right, I don't want to dismiss how you feel or anything but so many people said this that they did experiments to see and it turns out that nah, overall, people thought mostly that the robot art was more human, and the effect comes from the knowledge of the painter. All things equal, emotional connections happen just as much (if not more) with generative art. That doesn't surprise me honestly, it's mimicking humans. And the rating of how likely it is to do so has guided it to the end product, so somehow, the humanity is embedded. It's not something that feels great as I am an artist myself, but I accept science on this one.

      • I'm not sure I understand your overall point here. It sounds like you're saying that the perceived emotional connections in art are simply the result of the viewer projecting emotions onto the piece, is that correct?

      • This makes sense, but I always feel "tricked" if I don't notice I'm reading or looking at generated stuff until after a tic.

  • 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.

  • Artists are inspired by each other.
    If I draw something being inspired by e. g. Bansky, and it's not a direct copy - it's legal.

    We don't live in a vacuum.

    • Counterpoints:

      Artists also draw distinctions between inspiration and ripping off.

      The legality of an act has no bearing on its ethics or morality.

      The law does not protect machine generated art.

      Machine learning models almost universally utilize training data which was illegally scraped off the Internet (See meta's recent book piracy incident).

      Uncritically conflating machine generated art with actual human inspiration, while career artist generally lambast the idea, is not exactly a reasonable stance to state so matter if factly.

      It's also a tacit admission that the machine is doing the inspiration, not the operator. The machine which is only made possible by the massive theft of intellectual property.

      The operator contributes no inspiration. They only provide their whims and fancy with which the machine creates art through mechanisms you almost assuredly don't understand. The operator is no more an artist than a commissioner of a painting. Except their hired artist is a bastard intelligence made by theft.

      And here they are, selling it for thousands.

      • It's also a tacit admission that the machine is doing the inspiration, not the operator. The machine which is only made possible by the massive theft of intellectual property.

        hard disagree on that one… the look of the image was, but the inspiration itself was derived from a prompt: the idea is the human; the expression of the idea in visual form is the computer. we have no problem saying a movie is art, and crediting much of that to the director despite the fact that they were simply giving directions

        The legality of an act has no bearing on its ethics or morality.

        Except their hired artist is a bastard intelligence made by theft.

        you can’t on 1 hand say that legality is irrelevant and then call it when you please

        or argue that a human takes inputs from their environment and produces outputs in the same way. if you say a human in an empty white room and exposed them only to copyright content and told them to paint something, they’d also entirely be basing what they paint on those works. we wouldn’t have an issue with that

        what’s the difference between a human and an artificial neural net? because i disagree that there’s something special or “other” to the human brain that makes it unable to be replicated. i’m also not suggesting that these work in the same way, but we clearly haven’t defined what creativity is, and certainly haven’t written off that it could be expressed by a machine

        in modern society we tend to agree that Duchamp changed the art world with his piece “Fountain” - simply a urinal signed “R. Mutt”… he didn’t sculpt it himself, he did barely anything to it. the idea is the art, not the piece itself. the idea was the debate that it sparked, the questions with no answer. if a urinal purchased from a hardware store can be art, then the idea expressed in a prompt can equally be art

        and to be clear, i’m not judging any of these particular works based on their merits - i haven’t seen them, and i don’t believe any of them should be worth $250k… but also, the first piece of art created by AI: perhaps its value is not in the image itself, but the idea behind using AI and its status as “first”. the creativity wasn’t the image; the creativity and artistic intent was the process

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