Christie’s has launched its first-ever sale dedicated to artworks created with artificial intelligence (AI), riding the AI revolution wave — a move by the famed auction house that has sparked anger among some artists.
The sale, titled “Augmented Intelligence,” features about 20 pieces and runs online until March 5.
Christie’s, like its competitor Sotheby’s, has previously offered AI-created items, but had never devoted an entire sale to this medium.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“AI has become more prolific in everybody’s daily lives,” Christie’s head of digital art sales Nicole Sales Giles said.
“More people understand the process and the technology behind AI and so are more readily able to appreciate AI also in creative fields,” she said.
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. Christie’s is offering a work by US artist Charles Csuri dating from 1966.
As a pioneer of computer art, he distinguished himself by using software to distort one of his hand-drawn sketches.
“All artists in the fine art sense, and particularly the artists that were featured in this auction, use AI to supplement their existing practices,” Sales Giles said.
The collection includes paintings, sculptures, photographs and giant screens displaying entirely digital works.
Among the sale’s highlights is Emerging Faces (estimated to sell for up to US$250,000) by US artist Pindar Van Arman, a series of nine paintings resulting from a “conversation” between two AI models.
The first model paints a face on canvas while the second stops it when it recognizes a human form.
The sale has not been welcomed by all, and an online petition calling for its cancellation has gathered more than 6,300 signatures.
Many of the submitted works “were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license,” the petition says.
It says the sale contributes to the “mass theft of human artists’ work.”
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 participating in the event with his animated creation Machine Hallucinations, defended the sale on X, saying the “majority of the artists in the project [are] specifically pushing and using their own datasets + their own models.”
Petition signatory and illustrator Reid Southern said that at a minimum, pieces should be excluded that do not use the artist’s own software or data — accounting for perhaps one-third of the sale.
“If these were oil paintings,” he said, and there “was a strong likelihood that many of them were either counterfeit or forgeries or stolen or unethical in some way, I don’t believe it would be ethical for Christie to continue the auction.”
“I’m not a copyright lawyer, so I can’t comment on the legality specifically, but the idea that artists have been looking at prior artists to influence their current work is not new,” Sales Giles said.
“Every new artistic movement generates controversy and criticism,” she added.
“Midjourney is trained on basically the entirety of the Internet,” said Turkish artist Sarp Kerem Yavuz, who used this software to create Hayal, also being auctioned at Christie’s.
“There’s so much information [out there] that you cannot infringe on individual copyright,” he said.
“That’s essentially arguing that it’s bad to steal from one or two people, but it’s okay to steal from millions of people, right?” Southern said.
The EU and US are nearing an agreement to coordinate on producing and securing critical minerals, part of a push to break reliance on Chinese supplies. The potential deal would create incentives, such as minimum prices, that could advantage non-Chinese suppliers, according to a draft of an “action plan” seen by Bloomberg. The EU and US would also cooperate on standards, investments and joint projects, as well as coordinate on any supply disruptions by countries like China. The two sides are additionally seeking other “like-minded partners” to join a multicountry accord to help create these new critical mineral supply chains, which feed into
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Japan approved ￥631.5 billion (US$3.97 billion) in additional subsidies to hasten Rapidus Corp’s entry into the high-stakes artificial intelligence (AI) chipmaking arena, ramping up support for a project widely regarded as a long shot. The capital is intended to bankroll Rapidus’ work for information technology firm Fujitsu Ltd, one of the initial customers that Tokyo hopes would get the signature endeavor off the ground. The new money raises the fees and investments that the government is injecting into the start-up to ￥2.6 trillion by the end of the current fiscal year to March next year, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and
The founder of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group (恆大集團) has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and bribery, a court said yesterday, the latest blow for what was once the country’s leading developer. Evergrande’s rise was propelled by decades of rapid urbanization and rising living standards, but in 2020, its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation. The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors. Founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), 67, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, was reportedly held by police in 2023, with Evergrande saying he had been subjected to
RSS