Thousands of Artists call for AI Art Auction to be cancelled

Christies New-York said its Augmented Intelligence sale would feature AI artworks spanning five decades. That puts several lots in the pre-generative AI era but in a web post Christies made it clear that several recently produced items were the outputs of image generators DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion — swiftly prompting the ire of creators who penned an open letter addressed to Christies’ digital art director Nicole Sales Giles and her manager Sebastian Sanchez.

“Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a licence,” said the letter. “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.” It went on: “Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivises AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work,” before adding: “We ask that, if you have any respect for human artists, you cancel the auction.”

Responding to the letter a Christies spokesperson told TechCrunch: “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.”

Main Image: Sample Generative Artwork Shown, Alexander Reben (B. 1985) Untitled Robot Painting, Estimate: $100 – 1,728,000