I’ve already seen auction houses start to cheat on AI art. Last year, the “autonomous AI artist” bot made $351,600 with Sotheby’s. However, Christie’s decision to host an entire auction dedicated to AI art this month has sparked a fierce backlash.
The controversy is no surprise. Many of today’s most popular AI image generators are trained in copyrighted materials without permission, and there is also the fear that AI will drive artists out of work. But not all AI art is theft. Is this the right fight for people who oppose image generation?
As seen in our work on the history of AI Art, the term broadly includes art created or co-created using artists or Collective’s own algorithms. In these cases, the discussion of AI begins to appear more like a Luddite response than an argument over ethics or intellectual property.
Christie’s Bills has bolstered intelligence as the first complete auction dedicated to AI art. It will be held at the Rockefeller Center Gallery in New York from February 20th to March 5th, featuring 20 lots ranging from digital art to sculpture, acrylic and oil painting. All pieces are created in some form of collaboration with artificial intelligence, with price estimates ranging from just $100 to $1.7 million.
The work includes data and works from pioneers of algorithmic art such as Refik Anadol, founder of the upcoming Dataland AI Art Museum. His mechanical hallucinations were made with AI models trained with curated images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Other artists include Sasha Styles, who works as an alter ego of her poems and Alexander Leben, the first artist to open, where untitled robot painting combines generative AI with live performances. Includes:
The open letter, with over 3,500 signatures, asks Christy to cancel the AI Art Auction. The text, signed by many artists, states, “AI models are known to be trained in copyrighted work without a license. These models and the companies behind them abuse human artists and use their work without permission to build commercial AI products that compete with them.”
There are so many so-called AI art, so I completely agree with that feeling. But filling everything with the same brush is very excessive. Christie’s does not sell Ai Slop using some prompts from Midjourney. Such “art” is rarely sold at the lowest prices estimated by auction houses.
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Many artists featured in custom algorithms for auction use are often trained with their own work. And many of the works were collaborations with algorithmic tools rather than pure AI generation, placing them in a long tradition of algorithmic art dating back to the 1960s.
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Written in X, Refik Anadol seemed to find the controversy interesting. “This is very interesting :). () The majority of artists in the project are using their own datasets + unique models specifically propelled and used! This is the basics of the entire artistic ecosystem. The hysteria-driven dark mind of problems, the outcome of lazy criticism practices, and the end of the apocalypse.”
This is very interesting 🙂 Most of the artists in the project use their own datasets + their own models in particular with push! This is the fundamental issues of the entire artistic ecosystem, the consequences of lazy criticism practices, and the hysterical-driven dark mind of the apocalypse. But the future is bright;) https://t.co/30yg1hulepfebruary 8, 2025
Artists represented by Christie’s sales emphasize that they have existing, existing, interdisciplinary art practices, some of which are recognized in major museum collections. “The works at this auction use artificial intelligence to enhance the body of work, and in most cases, AI is trained with the artist’s own input, so it is adopted in a controlled way.” He says that.
Nicole Sales Giles, Christie’s director of digital art, said in an exhibition announcement: Apart from human agents, but not separate, but achievable. ”
The discussion sparked by the auction shows the ongoing controversy over AI art and the strength of its opinions. Even old-fashioned Photoshops have come to lead to accusations of AI use, as we saw in recent Fantastic Four Posters. However, they criticize all AI art as if it was created using tools such as stable diffusion risk. Lose support for the use of unauthorized art to train image generators. Meanwhile, the US Copyright Office sheds more light on its stance on AI Art Copyright.
Find auction details on Christie’s website.
