An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian: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... The British composer Ed Newton-Rex, a key figure in the campaign by creative professionals for protection of their work and a signatory to the letter, said at least nine of the works appearing in the auction appeared to have used models trained on artists' work. However, other pieces in the auction do not appear to have used such models. A spokesperson for Christie's said that "in most cases" the AI used to create art in the auction had been trained on the artists' "own inputs". More than 6,000 people have now signed the letter, which states point-blank that "Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license."These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them. Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies' mass theft of human artists' work. We ask that, if you have any respect for human artists, you cancel the auction. Last week ARTnews spoke to Nicole Sales Giles, Christie's vice-president and director of digital art sales (before the open letter was published). And Giles insisted one of the major themes of the auction is "that AI is not a replacement for human creativity.""You can see a lot of human agency in all of these works," Giles said. "In every single work, you're seeing a collaboration between an AI model, a robot, or however the artist has chosen to incorporate AI. It is showing how AI is enhancing creativity and not becoming a substitute for it." One of the auction's headline lots is a 12-foot-tall robot made by Matr Labs that is guided by artist Alexander Reben's AI model. It will paint a new section of a canvas live during the sale every time the work receives a bid. Reben told ARTnews that he understands the frustrations of artists regarding the AI debate, but he sees "AI as an incredible tool... AI models which are trained on public data are done so under the idea of 'fair use,' just as search engines once faced scrutiny for organizing book data (which was ultimately found to fall under fair use)," he said.... "AI expands creative potential, offering new ways to explore, remix, and evolve artistic expression rather than replace it. The future of art isn't about AI versus artistsit's about how artists wield AI to push boundaries in ways we've never imagined before...." Digital artist Jack Butcher has used the open letter to create a minted digital artwork called Undersigned Artists. On X he wrote that the work "takes a collective act of dissentan appeal to halt an AI art auctionand turns it into the very thing it resists: a minted piece of digital art. The letter, originally a condemnation of AI-generated works trained on unlicensed human labor, now becomes part of the system it critiques." Christie's will accept cryptocurrency payments for the majority of lots in the sale.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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