Christie's first-ever AI sale angers some artists

by Thomas URBAIN

Christie's has launched its first-ever sale dedicated to artworks created with artificial intelligence, 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.

"AI has become more prolific in everybody's daily lives," said Nicole Sales Giles, Christie's head of digital art sales.

"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 artificial intelligence 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 American artist Charles Csuri (1922-2022) 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," said Sales Giles.

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 $250,000) by American 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.

- 'Controversy and criticism' -

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," it says.

The petition says the sale contributes to the "mass theft of human artists' work."

Several artists filed lawsuits in 2023 against generative AI startups, 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 don't use the artist's own software or data -- accounting for perhaps one-third of the sale, he said.

"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."

Sales Giles responded: "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.

"Every new artistic movement generates controversy and criticism," she added.

"Midjourney is trained on basically the entirety of the internet," said noted 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.

Southern, the illustrator, pushed back.

"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?" he said.

© Agence France-Presse