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.
I’m afraid that we seen to disagree on who an artist is and what is a valid moral trade off.
Is it really the democratization of art? Or the commodification of art?
Art has, with the exception of extraordinary circumstances, always been democratic. You could at any point pick up a pencil and draw.
Ai has funneled that skill, critically through theft, into a commodified product, the ai model. Through with they can make huge profits.
The machine does the art. And, even when run on your local machine the model was almost certainly trained on expensive machines through means you could not personally replicate.
I find it alarming that people are so willing to celebrate this. It’s like throwing a party that you can buy bottled Nestle water at the grocery store which was taken by immoral means. It’s nice for you, but ultimately just further consolation of power away from individuals.