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.
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.