More than 5,600 artists signed an open letter protesting the auction, saying that the works used AI models that are trained on copyrighted work.
A representative for Christie’s shared a statement about the issue. “From the beginning, two things have been true about the art world: one, artists are inspired by what came before them, and two, art can spark debate, discussion, and controversy,” the statement reads. “The discussions around digital art, including art created using AI technology, are not new and in many ways should be expected. Many artists – Pop artists, for example – have been the subject of similar discussions. Having said that, Christie’s, a global company with world-class experts, is uniquely positioned to explore the relatively new and ever-changing space of digital art: the artists, collectors, market and challenges.”
Cutting out the artist middleman in their money-laundering scheme. What a joke.
I enjoy art for the human aspects, the hundreds of musicians performing a single piece together, the incredible talent and skill on display in a photorealistic painting of a person who died hundreds of years ago, or the incredible mind and life of a person writing a moving essay. I don’t usually enjoy art for the sake of the object or product.
AI generated material robs that intangible spirit, floods the world with meaningless content, and as a consequence makes it more challenging to find art. Even when you sort through the muck and see that photorealistic painting, you aren’t imagining the monk who painted it, you’re looking at the hands thinking I don’t know if this is real or not.
Fortunately that’s mainly online for now, you can still go to a concert or museum to confidently see art, you can opt out of the AI content experience. But this sale symbolizes a further erosion of that separation. It seems inevitable that there will be AI “concerts” and “exhibitions” which will physically take space and money from actual artists and further challenge finding enjoyment from art and artists for people like me.
I understand others enjoy art differently, as a consumable product for example, and those people may not be as bothered by AI content. I do hope those people understand that it does impact other people around them and that the generated material is coming at a cost, if not to them, to those people (and the environment, and the artists).
Well said. I think AI “art” is really best considered just a form of entertainment since there is no human perspective put into it. Adam Savage said it best (paraphrasing here) “In order for me to be interested in a work of art it needs to be coming from a point of view. I don’t see anything resembling a point of view with AI.”
I feel like everyone who’s against image/text generation on the grounds of artists’ financial wellbeing is actually against capitalism rather than AI.
Ahh, yes, finally the 1% can do their tax scams AND not pay actual artists. Truly the most cursed timeline
I’m actually against AI art since creative professions are already lacking in labor rights, and it’s going to get worse now that they’re trying to make artists replaceable.
But one of the worst things about it, to me, is that it’s caused artists to start going to bat for IP laws. IP law is the reason you don’t get to finish that story you spent years on, because HBO deleted it in a tax write-off. You don’t even get to talk about what it might have been like, because you’re under NDA.
Now people want it to be illegal to be influenced by copyrighted things. Great.
I’m not anti-ai art, but I think that if IP laws exists, artist should be able to use them. Either AI art is considered public domain, or it should be certified as having been trained only on public/properly compensated work. I do think current IP laws are so out of date they’re basically irrelevant, but artists should be able to enforce these archaic laws if they are subject to them.
Mind you, people will probably still pay 700k for the “original print” or whatever certified/signed by the person who generated it, but at least the work itself should be public.
AI art is not protected by copyright, yes. That isn’t a “should” but rather how it actually works in nearly all countries but a few, certainly including the US.
Correct, but they were stating that people should not support artists backing IP laws, and my lay understanding is that the only thing keeping it that way is IP laws. If we got rid of IP laws, I’m not sure individual artists would win. Large corporations would be able to produce at scale, and you’d get the same issue as with redbubble or whatever, but with legit companies instead of shady ones.
For sure. I personally think our current IP laws are well equipped to handle AI generated content, even if there are many other situations where they require a significant overhaul. And the person you responded to is really only sort of maybe half correct. Those advocating for, e.g., there to be some sort of copyright infringement in training AI aren’t going to bat for current IP laws-- they’re advocating for altogether new IP laws effectively thar would effectively further assetize and allow even more rent seeking in intangibles. Artists would absolutely not come out ahead on this and it’s ludicrous to think so. Publishing platforms would make creators sign those rights away and large corporations would be the only ones financially capable of acting in this new IP landscape. The compromise also likely would be attaching a property right in the model outputs and so it would actually become far more practical to leverage AI generated material at commercial scale since the publisher could enforce IP rights on the product.
The real solution to this particular issue is require all models that out materials to the public at large be open source and all outputs distributed at large be marked as generated by AI and thus being effectively in the public domain.
Unfortunately, I can’t speak intelligently as to specifically what should be done with IP, but broad strokes I agree that output should be public domain and public facing models should be open. I do feel as though there should be a way to compensate people for inputs used for internal commercial purposes.
If there’s training needed for something and it has separate books/video, a company should not be able to throw that into an AI, and generate a new book/video for their internal use. Either they need to make that resource available publicly, or purchase a specific license for internal use of the original material for AI. I don’t know why I think that, mostly just vibes based because if they hired a person/company to do the same I’d be fine with it, so maybe I just have some cognitive dissonance going on, but it feels different. The way that there are commercial and personal licenses, I think having an AI license might make sense. But again, I’m way out of my depth and field of knowledge here, so I could be way off.
This anti-AI propaganda talking point is getting old.
Value each artist’s input at what it is: if there is no input, then it’s slop; if there is input, value the input.
Some works of art, long predating AI, for your consideration:
These are great examples of that part of art AI can not capture.
The first was painted by a donkeys tail in the presence of a legal witness, sent to exhibition under a false name, and when it began to be recognized at the time by critics and media, the artist said “aha! You literally like art that a donkey can make, your taste is terrible and so is popular art”.
The second is a physical can of the artists feces (I don’t know if anyone has opened the can to be sure), this time with no explicit agenda. What did the artist mean by this, was it another criticism of art critics, was it a criticism of the commodification of art, or something else entirely?
The last was made as the artist tried to find a religious experience derived from art. He said with this piece he did. I don’t find it particularly compelling, but 100 years ago this rethinking of what art can be was revolutionary enough for Stalin to send him to the camps.
If you only value art for consumption, yes these are exactly the same as me sitting at the computer pressing generate for a few hours. If any of the context is included in your enjoyment of the art, there is no comparison.
…Propaganda? Cnet?
The best part of artwork is when you can see an artists personality through their art. Because Ai art is just stolen from other people who have poured their energy into their craft, it completely ruins the point.
It feels cheap. But because of this garbage, it’s also made me appreciate real art so much more.
Only a moron would pay for this, let alone $700K
Unless it is a tax scam.
More than 5,600 artists signed an open letter protesting the auction, saying that the works used AI models that are trained on copyrighted work.
All artists are trained on copyrighted work.
except AI isn’t human, obviously. so corporations can deploy millions of instances to churn out slop while crediting no one, thus erasing all the cultures that went into said slop.
while all the remaining artists become even more impoverished from the devaluing of their art. there’s a name for this behavior if a human was doing it, it’s called being a scab
thus erasing all the cultures that went into said slop.
Nobody’s art is being deleted, what are you trying to say here?
When there is so much AI slop out in the world that it makes you question whether something is AI or not. That’s definitely erasing human creativity.
yeah what it leads to in practice is the original art style of the victim being scrutinized due to “looking like AI art”.
like, no, the AI actually looks like this art style because so many techbros stole it without crediting the artist and now everybody thinks that the style belongs to the AI overlords.
it’s happened to me a few times where I see gorgeous art and I second-guess myself for a split second when I see certain digital art styles.
that is a horrible experience to have as an art enjoyer and concerning how few so-called “tech enthusiasts” actually value the human beings that led to them enjoying art.
they’ve been so brainwashed by AI propaganda and bootstraps ideology that they can’t imagine a future that’s worse than today because corporate tech futurism so often labels cyberpunk futures as utopia
Let’s abolish all copyright then, since everything is influenced upon things that came before it. Right?
Yeah, this is what I don’t get. “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” This is a quote for a reason. Everything is just a remix of something else. Just look at the shit Andy Warhol put out.
Also, you can’t copyright AI art, so I’m not sure what the point of paying money for AI art is for.
In what world does it take two people to “make” a piece of malformed AI schlock?
Herndon and Dryhurst are frequent collaborators, and xhairymutantx is their work. So they didn’t just prompt an LLM to make the image, they trained the model themselves. And they specifically trained the model on pictures of Herndon (who has distinctive red, braided hair).
I’m personally a really big fan of their work (which I don’t expect everyone to be), but the picture that’s being circulated in articles and apparently sold at auction without context is pretty uninspiring.
Reminds me of the way that many DJ’s do little more than press play. The “brand-name” of the “artist” becomes more important than the art.
If the public’s appreciation of art is dumbed down, then it is logical for art to be dumbed down too.
except actual humans do work on that and get royalties for shadow producing those pre-recorded sets. not comparable
That print does actually look pretty nice, but I hate how inconsistent the two images are. It’d drive me fing crazy to have those prints on my wall when the continuity of design is so clearly lacking.
I see it as a time capsule, capturing a moment in time in the medium’s evolution. I mean, check out the first ever AI-generated image that sold for $432,500 USD back in 2018:
