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'Mass Theft': Thousands of Artists Call for AI Art Auction to be Cancelled (theguardian.com) 80

Posted by EditorDavid from the eye-of-the-beholder dept.
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 artists — it'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 dissent — an appeal to halt an AI art auction — and 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.
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'Mass Theft': Thousands of Artists Call for AI Art Auction to be Cancelled More

'Mass Theft': Thousands of Artists Call for AI Art Auction to be Cancelled

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  • Why is this different (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 15, 2025 @01:43PM (#65168903)
    From a person studying and adopting an art style from existing pieces of work? Because it's on a computer?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Not much, but its under the control of a corporation that uses it explicitly for that purpose. when its a single artist adapting a stlye from another, noone would care. a single corporation adapting all of them... well it needs to be battled out in court i think. i personaly would side with the artists on that matter.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        How about an art school that teaches an art style? How about a textbook for that purpose? How does the law different depending on the size of the alleged crime and power of the victim?

        • Yeah, I agree that this new computer capability really sucks for artists, especially those focused on mass media, but it doesn’t mean its illegal.

          I’m not sure where in the copyright law it outlines protections around anything or anyone looking at a lot of art and mimicking its style to produce a different piece.

          As others have said here, it’s similar to how human brains work. Learn, mimic, and refine your skills until you develop your own style - except others analyzing your style would rec

      • If you sell your art (or do **any** dealing with the general public what-so-ever), I hope you have the sense to place these affairs under the control of a corporation. There's not a single attorney on the entire planet which would tell you otherwise.
    • Exactly.

      AI art isn’t theft, it’s just another tool for creating. Like how artists use Photoshop or cameras, AI helps bring ideas to life, but the artist still guides the process. Human artists also learn by studying and emulating existing art—whether it’s copying techniques or styles from the past. AI does something similar, learning from a mix of data, but it’s not copying directly. Instead, it transforms ideas into something new. So, AI art is just a modern way to create,

      • I do some AI creations, but I don't have the expectation to make any kind of money from it and don't want to either, it's just for fun.

        After all AI can only create art based on known styles and artists, it can't create new genres.

      • AI cannot create. There has never been a provision made in them to come up with anything original. Everything they do is a calculation based on things that people have done. There just isn't any other way for it to derive an answer. The fact that you cannot recognize what the work is derived from doesn't mean it has created anything, just that it has mixed up everything very well using the input as entropy.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Indeed. Incidentally, human-created fully derivative work is not protected either and may well be illegal. It is just harder to prove that something human-created was fully derivative and most humans have at least some insight and some creativity, so human-created work is almost never fully derivative. But for AI, it is easy to prove. The mathematics used makes sure anything an AI does is fully derivative.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        (1) The law sees machines and humans differently and rightfully so.
        (2) AI cannot create, it can only mix and do derivative stuff, so the exceptions for humans do not even apply on that level.

        Incidentally, machines do not "learn". That is just a simplification and misuse of the term to "explain" it to the masses. The actual process is fundamentally different.

    • From a person studying and adopting an art style from existing pieces of work? Because it's on a computer?

      Because people who earn a living in creative fields know how precarious their position truly is. The industry is heavily gatekept and "making it" requires making the right social connections as well as talent. The idea that AI could make all of that mean nothing and that they'd have to go out and get real jobs like the rest of us, is a huge potential threat.

      Thing is, people who want to create art because they love art will still do so even in our post-AI world. It's just the people who want to earn profi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by haruchai ( 17472 )

        " they'd have to go out and get real jobs like the rest of us"
        WTF is a "real job"? I know quite a few people in the arts & they work very hard for relatively low pay.
        How is that not "real"?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          It depends on what you're talking about. When most people say "artist" I think there's an impression of, like, a person doing masterly paintings or whatnot, whereas most people working as artists in professional fields are doing things like my ex-sister-in-law who creates and lays out vinyl wraps for vehicles and product labels for packaging. It's not some fun, free-form creative process of making fine art, but rather things like trying to convince the customer that their MS Paint sketch will look awful o

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by haruchai ( 17472 )

            I'm puzzled why you chose the aluminum industry & not automotive, which essentially built the American middle class and several other countries

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gilgongo ( 57446 )

      I think it's the scale/capacity of the computer to produce derivative works they're mainly objecting too. Otherwise, as you rightly imply, preventing the copying of style, approach or some other inspiration would kill art stone dead. Or at least mean that the only artists that could survive were those using AI to screen their works against prior art so that they could not be accused of "theft".

      One thing I agree with them on is that you should not be allowed to prompt using artists names. That seems unnecess

  • Basically fraud (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pf0tzenpfritz ( 1402005 ) on Saturday February 15, 2025 @01:51PM (#65168915) Journal

    "Art" that is created by a non-scient, non-sapient entity, that has neither an idea what it is doing nor an artist's intention is by definition not art. So auctioning it off as works of art simply is fraud. The only reason why some fools will buy that shit is their expectation of an even bigger ignorant being willing to pay more for it than they paid themselves. Risky business not only because as soon as the AI hype is over, nobody will care anymore but also because a court might rule that "AI art" is of no artistic value which is not as unlikely as it might sound.

    • >"Art" that is created by a non-scient, non-sapient entity, that has neither an idea what it is doing nor an artist's intention is by definition not art.

      I disagree; a print of the Mona Lisa is still art. The artist's intent only matters if you're aware of it and, well, if you care.

      Something can be beautiful and inspiring to a person even if it's a natural phenomenon with no mind behind it at all.

    • "Art" that is created by a non-scient, non-sapient entity, that has neither an idea what it is doing nor an artist's intention is by definition not art. So auctioning it off as works of art simply is fraud.

      Why is it "fraud"? I suspect you're using the completely wrong word. It's not a blind auction, you can see up front what is on sale and it's entirely up to you to bid what you think its value is. It literally matches none of the definitions of fraud, not in the real dictionary not the legal one.

      The only reason why some fools will buy that shit is their expectation of an even bigger ignorant being willing to pay more for it than they paid themselves.

      Or maybe ... they like it? I mean I have art hanging on my wall and it's not like I have any intention of selling it nor any delusion that it's value is increasing. There are some truly amazing pictures created entir

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      Why do you think the auctioned art is not made by humans? It's not like the AI is acting on its own. We're talking about image generators and not about I, robot here.

    • Re:Basically fraud (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Saturday February 15, 2025 @02:37PM (#65169009) Journal

      Art is anything you can get away with. -- Marshall McLuhan

    • Art has already had its definition stretched to mean that it can be anything. I've seen a "painting" made by having a rat run across a canvas after its feet were dipped in paint. I'm not sure what the rat intended and am reasonably certain it's incapable of what you've defined as artistic thought. Maybe you would argue that a sapient human being clearly helped and merely used the rat as a tool in the creation of the art, but then how is it different for a human to use a computer program in the generation of

      • If you have to argue about whether or not it's art ... then it's art.

        Now, whether or not it's good art is something posterity will decide.

    • Oh please, art has lost any protective and meaning when they started selling a banana ducktaped to a wall as art. It had no artistic value whatsoever. Also calling a full red painted canvas art also looses any meaning to the word art. People copy each other daily, with no real artistic value behind it, even at artclasses we just slapped something together and thought up a story around it to satisfy our teacher. Art created by AI still has its value, people seem to like it, have a feeling from it, so why isn

    • > "Art" that is created by a non-scient, non-sapient entity, that has neither an idea what it is doing nor an artist's intention is by definition not art.

      This is how I feel about the banana duck taped to the wall.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DavenH ( 1065780 )
      > "by definition"

      Let's stop using that fallacy, shall we?

      https://www.lesswrong.com/post... [lesswrong.com]

    • "Art" that is created by a non-scient, non-sapient entity, that has neither an idea what it is doing nor an artist's intention is by definition not art.

      Whose definition would that be?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Here I'll FTFY: "Art" that is created by a scient, sapient entity, that has an idea what it is doing and an artist's intention, is by definition not art. Auctioning it off as works of art simply is fraud. The only reason why some fools will buy that shit is their expectation of an even bigger ignorant being willing to pay more for it than they paid themselves. Risky business not only because as soon as the artistic hype is over, nobody will care anymore but also because a court might rule that "art" is of

  • What people are missing... (Score:3)

    by rabbirta ( 10188987 ) on Saturday February 15, 2025 @01:58PM (#65168927) Homepage
    What people seem to be missing is that these models will often produce exact replicas of an artists work - signature and all.

    It's not transformative. It's the equivalent of me going to your website, copying it verbatim, and then releasing it as my own.

    Some people are completely against copyright, but frankly those people should tell that to Sony, Nintendo, Apple... and any other organization that has claimed rights to intellectual property.

    As a software pirate, I get it. Copyright laws are annoying, especially if you're poor... but at that point we need to discuss the root cause of these debates, and it isn't AI or generative text - it's a debate about patents.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Baron_Yam ( 643147 )

      >What people seem to be missing is that these models will often produce exact replicas of an artists work - signature and all.

      And I would hope this is considered 'obviously wrong'.

      But then we have the fact that artists aren't magical, they produce output based on their experience and training. Fundamentally, they aren't any different from an AI art generator other than having some better filtering at both the input and output stages.

      You have to ask yourself why output from a trained AI is not valuable o

      • But then we have the fact that artists aren't magical, they produce output based on their experience and training. Fundamentally, they aren't any different from an AI art generator

        Fundamentally artists are different than an AI art generator. You've spent very little time researching this topic, and too much time talking about it, like an old man. As a very small example, human artists can count fingers.

        That said, this action is "AI augmented", meaning the humans are using AI to help them create art. The results are quite good.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      "What people seem to be missing is that these models will often produce exact replicas of an artists work - signature and all."

      Great, then that's the copyright violation. No need for new law, and no need to preempt the sale of works that you haven't (yet) proven violate copyright.

      No one is missing this point, it is artists that are suggesting this is happening without proof.

      "It's not transformative. It's the equivalent of me going to your website, copying it verbatim, and then releasing it as my own."

      False

    • What people seem to be missing is that these models will often produce exact replicas of an artists work - signature and all.

      Human artists do that too, and when they do it's a copyright violation. Given that AI can't seem to tell the difference, the onus is on Christie's and the seller to assure that the AI work is not derivative (in the copyright sense) of any of the copyrighted training materials. But that's it. There's no automatic violation just because a human or a machine trained themselves on copyrighted art.

    • Re:What people are missing... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday February 15, 2025 @02:31PM (#65168991)

      What people seem to be missing is that these models will often produce exact replicas of an artists work - signature and all.

      No. What people are missing is that this models *can* produce replicas. They utterly fail to produce them exactly, and even then the model itself is not the theft. The output is. If the art auction was selling a replica of another picture by all means go in and sue them for copyright infringement.

      Saying it's not transformative is like saying Michelangelo's statue of David is not transformative because Michelangelo studied under Bertoldo and presumably could recreate one of Bertoldo's artworks.

      It's a completely bonkers point to judge the copyright of a resulting piece of work based entirely on the knowledge of the person or system which created it. The works stands on its own.

    • What is also apparently above most people's heads is the massive industrial scale and speed that is introduced by automation.
      I argue THAT is the essential difference between Joe Student copying something and Microsoft ingesting it.

      Microsoft has said they consider EVERYTHING on the internet to be public domain, that is their interpretation of fair use. Implied is you can sue them if you disagree.

      Anyone who hand waves that off, is just ignoring the obvious: industrial scale and speed makes automation differen

    • What people seem to be missing is that these models will often produce exact replicas of an artists work - signature and all.

      Most diffusion models can only physically store on the order of a single byte per image from the models training set. Signatures and watermarks are produced by the model because it learns the relationship between certain flavors imagery and existence of these features not because the image being produced is an exact replica watermark and all. There are similar artifacts with models trained from scans from books and magazines... you can sometimes see features such as folds and whitespace beyond image borde

    • What people seem to be missing is that these models will often produce exact replicas of an artists work - signature and all.

      If there are specific artists seeing their specific works being copied and resold in this way, they should absolutely feel free to sue. There are laws and precedents for exactly this. There is no shortage of lawyers with experience in this area.

      To make a blanket claim that anything produced by any AI which has been trained by looking at extensive collections of work by humans must be banned up front... that's a tougher sell.

  • same old lies (Score:3)

    by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Saturday February 15, 2025 @02:10PM (#65168937)

    "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."

    And? What makes training require a license? Human neural networks can train 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."

    There's that lie again, "compete with them". Did those "human artists" ever look at art from other artists? If so, they have done the same thing, yet that is not illegal.

    "Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies' mass theft of human artists' work."

    Why be concerned with a relatively few artists when AI training does the same with millions and millions of non-artists' work? It only matters when it's artists?

    "Christie's will accept cryptocurrency payments for the majority of lots in the sale."

    What a credibility enhancer.

  • Rich idiots are paying 5-6 digits for AI slop? LMAO!

    • Re:BWAHAHAHA (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Saturday February 15, 2025 @02:17PM (#65168961)

      That's the real story. Why would you pay so much for something that a prompt jockey could crank out in less than a day? It's not even novel, publicly-available tools could likely produce exact replicas on the cheap.

      • And remember that it's legal for anyone else to copy, alter, and sell the exact same images, since AI-generated art is uncopyrightable.

        • Right unless it's been modified enough by humans hands, and even then it's nebulous as to what meets that standard. Though if the AI is violating someone's copyright, copies of the AI-produced artwork will also be in violation so be careful about how and where you use it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by allo ( 1728082 )

          If you pay 6 digits for an image, it is not about if someone could copy it. The original is more like a status symbol that you cannot replace with a reprint.

      • Because they don't care about spending money and they can't be arsed figuring it out themselves. Look for normal people it seems strange to not care how money is spent or even wasted, but the world is full of people for whom money is an irrelevant number that is used simply to transact something.

        e.g. I personally know one guy who didn't even bother cancelling a Hertz rental when he suddenly was required to fly somewhere else. He left his rental car parked in garage for 3 weeks while he was in another city,

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Xaide ( 1015779 )
        Do you have a better way to launder money?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      The word AI slop got meaningless, as some people use it as a synonym to all AI art. Also slop is a term that comes from text AI and isn't even well defined for image AI. There you say AI artifacts (just like you say JPEG artifacts).

  • I'd wager all humans were trained at least in part by other artists work, without a licence. Free loading off the work of DaVinci and Dali etc. Perhaps anyone who creates anything should be paid perpetuity by those that come after them?

  • How many people now know about the auction, who would have never heard of them? I guess the protest is Christie's very welcome.

  • 80% of proceeds from any AI art sales or auctions must to go to fund UBI
    80% of proceeds from all types of gambling must go to fund UBI
    70% of proceeds from yacht sales must go to fund UBI
    70% of proceeds from private jet sales must go to fund UBI

    • No sales tax will solve the issue.

      We are entering an age where the need for human effort is marginal, and still operating under a heavily flawed capitalist economic system that encourages dangerously unsustainable wealth disparity.

      I don't have any idea how to replace capitalism, but I know how to patch it: a wealth tax that scales exponentially as your wealth deviates further from the median, with the funds redistributed as UBI.

    • Why do you feel a need to find a revenue source to fund UBI? We don't fund any of our other government programs we currently have. Why should UBI be any different?

  • Art is something people accept as art. It's 100% subjective. One person's "art" is another's "random chalkboard or fridge door macaroni."

    AI (LLMs) don't create art any differently than people do. It's just a matter of taking stuff you've been exposed to, your own random thoughts, and putting them together.

    Those so-called artists are upset because they lack creativity. If a large language model can outdo them... there wasn't much to outdo before.

    QUIET you faux artists. You're just overcharging suckers i

  • wait a minute considering art students - perhaps thats not such a bad idea!

  • It's only theft if the company didn't buy the books they used.

    If an artists steals a book, then this is theft.

    If he afterwards creates some art with the knowledge he learned from the stolen book, that's no theft. .. same for AI, the theft occurs during the training phase when companies rip data that is not publicly available without a fee. If they don't do that, it's completely legal for any AI to 'read the book and learn from it'. Anyway, after that, publishing has some other things to take into account to

  • Seriously. I feel like most the public is clutching their pearls for the wrong reason. Web scrapers are as old as the internet. Did you really think all this was free? You have always been the product. And when you could use the internet to sell more and get more eyes on your work, then this was no problem to the same people that are now screaming bloody murder. I'm all for a general Internet Bill of Rights with broad protections for EVERYONE'S data (maybe give us a choice between paying a subscription for

  • It's not art either
    It's crap, and if people want to pay for crap, I don't care
    We need AI that can help us solve previously intractable problems
    We already have artists. They do it well. We need AI that can do things we can't

  • The artists are not wrong are they. Without this training data the A.I modems would be useless. to claim original data is not store internally in the model is entirely specious.

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