Fine-arts auction house Christie’s is set to launch “Augmented Intelligence,” its first auction devoted entirely to art created with the help of AI.
The auction will run from Feb. 20 through March 5, with a concurrent exhibit at Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries in New York. “Augmented Intelligence” will feature more than 20 lots — from digital art to sculptures, acrylic and oil paintings and inks on paper.
“AI technology is undoubtedly the future, and its connection to creativity will become increasingly important,” Nicole Sales Giles, Christie’s director of digital art, said in a Friday statement announcing the auction. Christie’s has sold AI art before but hasn’t focused an entire auction on it until now.
“Augmented Intelligence” will include works by early pioneers of algorithmic art and prominent contemporary digital artists such as Refik Anadol, who used AI to interpret and transform more than 200 works from New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Anadol also co-founded Dataland, an L.A. venue billed as the first museum of A.I. arts and scheduled to open later this year. His piece in the Christie’s auction comes from “Machine Hallucinations,” an otherworldly series of “AI data paintings” made with an AI model trained on a set of curated images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Also on the block is an “AI poem sculpture” by Sasha Stiles that presents the sentiment “words can communicate beyond words” in a black matte steel and LED neon lightbox. Stiles collaborates with an algorithmic alter-ego trained on her poetry, and created a writing system that fuses her own handwriting with the zeroes and 1s of machine speak.
Then there’s Alexander Reben’s “Untitled Robot Painting,” which merges generative AI and live performance. The 10×12 foot acrylic evolves over time, with a robot adding to on canvas each time someone places a new bid on the work. Christie’s price estimates span a staggering gap, from $100 all the way up to $1.7 million.
Reben last year completed a stint as the first artist in residence at OpenAI, maker of Dall-e, one of several popular generative AI tools that allow anyone to create an image with typed or spoken prompts. Products like Dall-e, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have made algorithmic art experimentation accessible to the masses, with the results filling Instagram feeds and Reddit forums — and catapulting AI art to the center of a passionate debate about the intersection of machines and creativity.
At the heart of the discussion are artists and designers who charge companies with stealing their work to train AI datasets without credit or compensation. An open letter to Christie’s demanding that the auction be cancelled expresses that concern. It has gotten almost 3,400 signatures so far.
Petition Calls For Auction Cancellation
“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,” reads the letter reads, which is dated Saturday. “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.”
Christie’s didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the pushback, but a Christie’s spokesperson told TechCrunch that “the artists represented in this sale all have strong, existing multidisciplinary art practices, some recognized in leading museum collections. The works in this auction are using artificial intelligence to enhance their bodies of work and in most cases, AI is being employed in a controlled manner, with data trained on the artists’ own inputs.”
In announcing the auction, Christie’s addressed another common concern expressed by some artists — that AI could replace them altogether. AI art of the caliber demonstrated in the auction is neither a shortcut to productivity, Christie’s emphasizes, nor a replacement for human discernment.
AI As Partner, Not Human Substitute
AI “enhances the human spectrum of creativity,’” Sales Giles says. “‘It’s about employing technology to push what is possible, exploring what is achievable outside of, but not separate from, human agency.”
It’s a view often echoed by artists at the forefront of the AI art frontier.
“I collaborate with AI to produce art that is transcendental, art that evokes in the viewer a wordless truth,” says artist Claire Silver, whose digital image “Daughter” appears on the list of auction lots with an estimated price between $40,000 and $60,000. “Together, we create works that are greater than either of us could make alone, neither more important than the other to the process.”
Silver is among the artists who view AI as a collaborative tool and challenge the assumption that AI can instantaneously produce a perfectly crafted, exhibit-ready work without any human intervention.
“Sometimes we hold AI to some sort of impossible set of standards where we ask systems to do entire jokes, entire shows, entire movies or entire songs themselves, and really, that’s never been the point,” Cristóbal Valenzuela, co-founder and CEO of AI start-up Runway, maker of a tool that generates videos from text, images or video clips, told me last year. “You can choose which parts you’re going to incorporate. It’s up to you as an artist how you want to best utilize it.”
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