Ignoring Protests, Christie's Holds AI Art Auction, Makes Big Money (cnet.com) 46
As Christie's auction house planned the first-ever auction dedicated to AI-generated art works, over 5,600 people signed an online letter urging them to cancel it. "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," the letter complained.
"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." CNET reports that the signers "range from illustrators to authors to art therapists to cinematographers, from countries all across the globe."
Christie's ignored them all and held the auction anyways. So what happened when it was over on Wednesday morning? More than 30 lots attracted hundreds of bids and brought in $728,784, Christie's reports. And there's a generational twist: The auction house says 37% of registrants were completely new to Christie's, and 48% of bidders were millennials or members of Gen Z... The highest price in the sale was $277,200 for a work by Refik Anadol titled Machine Hallucinations — ISS Dreams — A. It used a data set of more than 1.2 million images taken from the International Space Station and satellites.
ARTnews reports that the auction actually brought in more than Christie's had expected: The sale, which made up of 34 lots, had an 82 percent sell through rate... While some digital artists, including Beeple, championed the sale, others decried it as emblematic of the ongoing struggle between human artistry and machine-driven innovation. The results, however, suggest that AI art — controversial as it may be — is carving a firm place in the market.
"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." CNET reports that the signers "range from illustrators to authors to art therapists to cinematographers, from countries all across the globe."
Christie's ignored them all and held the auction anyways. So what happened when it was over on Wednesday morning? More than 30 lots attracted hundreds of bids and brought in $728,784, Christie's reports. And there's a generational twist: The auction house says 37% of registrants were completely new to Christie's, and 48% of bidders were millennials or members of Gen Z... The highest price in the sale was $277,200 for a work by Refik Anadol titled Machine Hallucinations — ISS Dreams — A. It used a data set of more than 1.2 million images taken from the International Space Station and satellites.
ARTnews reports that the auction actually brought in more than Christie's had expected: The sale, which made up of 34 lots, had an 82 percent sell through rate... While some digital artists, including Beeple, championed the sale, others decried it as emblematic of the ongoing struggle between human artistry and machine-driven innovation. The results, however, suggest that AI art — controversial as it may be — is carving a firm place in the market.
Sea beams (Score:3, Insightful)
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain; sea-beams glitter in the dark light that burns twice as bright burns and burns.
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I liked it too.
I believe the "anti-AI art" movement is mostly emotional.
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I think it makes them feel insecure. They seem to posture and puff their chest out at it. Denigrate it irrationally.
Not to say there aren't negative things about it or anything like that- just that seems to cause a certain subset of people to immediately start foaming at the mouth.
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Now someone else owns it, and you don't.
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You can't launder money by watching a YouTube video that's freely available.
You can launder money through art auctions.
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You can't launder money by watching a YouTube video that's freely available.
Sure you can.
Just because the video is freely available to you doesn't mean it's freely available to "sponsor".
You can launder money through anything that involves people paying you.
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Same for much other art. What is a banana taped to a wall worth?
I won't even question that it can be art. But I wouldn't invest much money for it.
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> The most expensive piece ISS Dreams [refikanadol.com] is pretty good,
If that link is the piece, it could have been done in the 90's w/o AI...
Those auctions... (Score:5, Insightful)
...are not about art. They're about money laundering and tax avoidance
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Re: Those auctions... (Score:2)
Electronic Funds Transfers?
Re:Those auctions... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. They are also an indication that taxes are way too low.
Re: Those auctions... (Score:1)
That's a bizarre take. Other comments suggest that this is largely money lsindeting and tax *evasion*. Perhaps taxes are too *high*, if people need to go to such extremes to evade them.
Regardless, if you want to see rich people parted from their money, you should like seeing them hand it out for collections of bits
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No, taxes are not "too high". Sociopaths like your average billionaire think they're paying too much even when they pay a pittance.
And who's "going to extremes"?
Us really rich people hire accountants, now what they go to to earn their keep is hardly my concern.
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If a government sets its tax rate to 0%, all that means is someone else is coming to tax you.
I recall in Haiti, the gangs recently decided to start charging a road toll on the main north-south route in the country. Some of the villagers were refusing to pay the tax. So the gangs came and shot 100 random people in that village. Now they're paying tax again.
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No auctions are about art, whether they are art auctions or not. You can tell this is true easily because you can't give them a painting of money in exchange for the artwork you've bid on.
AI-generated art is plagarism (Score:2)
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Re:AI-generated art is plagarism (Score:5, Insightful)
So a system that is loosely based on the human brain can be trained by viewing a bunch of content and then can create variations based upon what it learned and that is a violation? So much "creative" work by humans is just variations on things they learned from. You can change 20% and be safe... but if an AI does the same thing and changes 50% ... that is illegal?
Can I ban you from looking at my publically available art because you might study it can get too inspired? if you buy the art and then learn from it... you can look but you can't alter your brain and create anything even 1% similar without permission or paying for being influenced!
Seems to me we've got a complex situation forcing a deeper discussion that wasn't handled before... because we couldn't automate at high scale what humans did slowly.
Re: AI-generated art is plagarism (Score:2)
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Seems to me we've got a complex situation forcing a deeper discussion that wasn't handled before... because we couldn't automate at high scale what humans did slowly.
An obvious answer about AI art which actually takes that into account and then makes an honest statement about it is that yes, machines and humans are different; we are living beings with needs, they are tools that we have created for our use, which do not have emotions and cannot be made to feel bad. Copyright is a human law made for human reasons, which should be account for human needs. Under a system of capitalism in which you must have currency units to exist, laws which protect humans' right to derive
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However, I think the conversation isn't just between capital and Luddites.
I think the primary problem with the Luddites, is they're having trouble bringing people over to their side, primarily because they're making the wrong argument. They're not making your argument.
Instead, they're trying to claim that inspiration is theft, the codification of which would be fucking insane- so I have to consider the Luddites insane.
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I'm talking about the actual, historical Luddites. My argument is essentially their argument, warmed over for this new technology.
However, the people claiming that AI represents theft have a reasonable argument, if you substitute "copyright infringement" for theft. It's a common misconception that the two are the same; I am also irritated when people use one term to describe the other thing, but it doesn't change the fact that AI use of copyrighted material for commercial purposes is reasonably arguably not
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I'm talking about the actual, historical Luddites. My argument is essentially their argument, warmed over for this new technology.
I'm referring to the neo-Luddites.
However, the people claiming that AI represents theft have a reasonable argument, if you substitute "copyright infringement" for theft. It's a common misconception that the two are the same; I am also irritated when people use one term to describe the other thing, but it doesn't change the fact that AI use of copyrighted material for commercial purposes is reasonably arguably not fair use, specifically because it is for commercial purposes which are not for the purposes of review, critique, or education.
Of course it's a fair use question.
Particularly- as you pointed out- due to the commercial nature.
However, even lacking fair use, it's still not theft. It's still no different than a person who has spent a lifetime going between art galleries, and then making a masterpiece.
If it's decided that the law should make that OK for people, and not for machines- I have no problem with that whatsoever. The law *should* favor humans.
But the principle of the thing does fucking mat
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Is a psychopath incapable of inspiration? Of course not.
I realize that it's easier to dehumanize people who don't function the same way you do, it's driven by a subconscious drive to deny that whatever happened to them could also happen to you. But it's also an inhuman act.
You cannot defeat AI by trying to bend the rules with handwavy bullshit that you can't actually define like "feelings" or "understanding".
You can only appeal to "feelings" because our understanding of what the difference is between AI and being human is incomplete, and intelligence is poorly defined at best.
The only thing that matters is that humans have feelings and machines do not, so what machines want doesn't matter and what
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I realize that it's easier to dehumanize people who don't function the same way you do, it's driven by a subconscious drive to deny that whatever happened to them could also happen to you. But it's also an inhuman act.
WTF are you talking about?
A psychopath is someone without functioning feelings. Are they still human? Of course they are.
Trying to limit the protection in the terms of stupid terms such as "feelings" is precisely what dehumanizes these people.
You can only appeal to "feelings" because our understanding of what the difference is between AI and being human is incomplete, and intelligence is poorly defined at best.
Nonsense.
You don't need to appeal to shit- you say:
Copyright protections and fair use apply only to humans, period.
This is how rational countries have solved this problem.
The only thing that matters is that humans have feelings and machines do not, so what machines want doesn't matter and what people want does. Everything else is an abstraction from guaranteeing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
This is a stupid take.
Law is simple- it only protects the fair use of human composition. Pro
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Law is simple- it only protects the fair use of human composition.
You don't seem to understand why.
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You don't seem to understand why.
Your thesis on the feeling-based underpinning of the rule of law is unconvincing.
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It's patently obvious the AI is trained on other peoples art. Regardless on how much it rearranges it. Other people's work and without compensating them
I think, if you look at the way art historically develops, not all AI generated art is plagiarism. If you use AI to essentially copy someone’s art with minor changes so that a comparison of the AI art and the artists works is basically undistinguishable, then yes it is. However, artists have long used others works as inspiration and created similar styled works, interpreting the artists who have gone before in new ways. In that sense, AI is just adding its own interpretation of the works and is not
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It's also patently obvious that artists are trained on other people's art. I play in a band, we write our own stuff. Our influences, and who we sound like are the subject of polite conversation, not vitriolic arguments and accusations of "theft".
Re: AI-generated art is plagarism (Score:1)
Re:AI-generated art is plagarism (Score:5, Insightful)
It's patently obvious the AI is trained on other peoples art.
Yes; most AI services will have trained on other peoples' images and learned to emulate the result of a process. That does not mean it is plagiarism. It's a generally not well-formed and baseless claim to suggest "AI usage is plagiarism".
Regardless on how much it rearranges it.
AI does not "rearrange" other peoples' work. Various generative AI models are developed and learn from others' work to develop the equivalent of a mathematical function or set of procedures, or rules.
A fundamental concept for artists is You have zero ownership of procedures, styles, methods, or general ideas.
That means other people if they are good enough, and yes, even Machines or AIs can study your work closely and learn off your work, and is not plagiarism; Even if they gain the ability to perfectly impersonate you and draw something you never drew in the exact manner you would have done if you had ever drawn that subject.
And if you want to claim the output of AI is Plagiarism, then first of all you need to identify WHICH AI service you are talking about, Because they are all quite different. AI is Not a singular entity.
In some cases the model even being used is developed primarily by images authored by the person using the model.
There are also a dozen different image generation services, and they all have different models and execution environments. For example, proving Novelai commits plagiarms at some point does not prove anything about DALL-E; It also does not prove the same AI commit plagiarism with all or most generations.
You would Then also furnish proof that their output is Plagiarism generally. Just finding examples of where a user was able to prompt one of the AIs into infringing does not create a basis for claiming every or most image made off a service is plagiarism.
Some of these services even let you know what their dataset is. If their potential Dataset is public, then they gave the credits for their model, and it is Not plagiarism when the attribution is stated. If the service tells you "We used the laion5B dataset of Image, Text pairs," then in fact, they have credited the contents of that dataset - It does not matter that a human cannot possibly review 5 billion credits entries in your natural lifetime; they have given credit where credit is due, so their model file cannot be considered plagiarism.
Whether an author gets financially compensated or not has no affect on whether it is plagiarism or not.
Not that matters either, since the evidence of plagiarism by any of the AI services is completely absent, and people like to just do a lot of handwaving.
art therapist? (Score:1)
Old masters (Score:2)
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Sucker art will eventually go away - market forces (Score:3)
I think we can expect more fuss and brouhaha over stuff like this for awhile, while Christie's and a few artists make money while they can off of the few people with more money than taste.
But, I think auctions with this (mostly low) caliber of art will be evanescent as artists, buyers, and public get more sophisticated or jaded as fascination-with-the-new wears off.
This stuff is too simple to make, so "the market" will get flooded with junk, and as the novelty wears off, people will get more sophisticated.
It's like leaverite.
Leaverite is the most popular mineral collected by novice rockhounds and gem hunters. It is not a real mineral. When naive newbies see a specimen of such and such, no matter how worn or un-salable, they will pick it up and bag it, but experienced collectors can tell them, "Leave 'er right there". That's what much of this new AI art is like.
But, that is not to be confused with legitimate art by legitimate artists using AI as just another tool for intelligent creation. Here is the difference :
At link https://refikanadol.com/works/... [refikanadol.com] is Machine Hallucinations : ISS Dreams.
AI was a tool, but the artist-engineer put a lot of hands and heads-on work into this. The AI was a tool, like a paintbrush is a tool, but the creative concept and hard work to implement it was all him.
This past summer, I was at the Denver Art Museum. They had an exhibit Biophilia, exploring man's relation to nature. https://www.denverartmuseum.or... [denverartmuseum.org]. I know, because one of my photos was part of the exhibit (not bragging, just the facts - well, maybe a little). Other items in the exhibit included full wall size computer screens running real time dynamic imagery using environmental inputs from the room to run the image generation. It was very similar to Machine Hallucinations : ISS Dreams. They are both indicative of where real artists are going as they explore these new media of creativity and public presentation.
In contrast, look at the three images at https://www.cnet.com/tech/serv... [cnet.com].
These illustrate why, I believe, the auction in question cannot occur ad infinitum. Auctions will continue. AI assisted art will advance. But, auction houses such as Christie's cannot keep putting up junk as the public gets more sophisticated.
Image 1 - Red braided space girl.
Interesting. It has a techno-futuristic vibe attuned to the AI-digital medium. It is definitely cool that generative AI is good enough to make such a complete image, the "this is new" wow factor. But, it is a weird image. I admit I do like some of the surreal elements, but after the first look, I didn't feel anything visually or emotionally or intellectually compelling that I would ever want to view it again (but, art is personal, and you might like it). Since it is now easy for anyone to generate hundreds or thousands of comparable images with no real artistic soul, each image becomes trivial. It is a fad image, but to me, questionable as art. The infatuation of the new will wear off soon enough.
Image 2 - Sunset statue in a garden.
This is pure AI junk "art". If you play with gen-AI art, such as MS Image Creator https://www.bing.com/images/cr... [bing.com] , this is one of the standard styles of output when artistic style is not otherwise specified. It has a CGI videogame polygon-texture-raytrace vibe that is far more artificial than photo-realistic. Once you have seen your first 100 or 1000 such images, it is boring. Again, it is truly inspirational that we have the technologies to do even this much, but once you start to expect meaningful or high quality imagery, stuff like this disappoints. This image is the sa
The market will drop when.... (Score:2)
The market will drop when the first bootlegged copy of AI art is passed around. After that, the floodgates will open and there goes any profit.
Breaking News (Score:2)
Dog Vomit (Score:2)