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 for works by artists including Refik Anadol and the late AI art pioneer Harold Cohen.
When someone makes use of a service and doesn’t pay afterwards that is considered to be theft even if the provider hasn’t been deprived on anything. For example, if I snuck into an art gallery without paying I won’t remove anything tangible since the gallery’s overheads and running costs were fixed long before I arrived.
A better word would be copyright infringement if the AI is making use of other works without a license or other permission. Based on my reading of the article it appears those involved only fed the AI works in the public domain or works that they had created themselves. The letter of complaint appears to be signed by artists who are unaware of these circumstances.
Even in your latter paragraph, it wouldn’t be an infringement. Assuming the art was lawfully accessed in the first place, like by clicking a link to a publicly shared portfolio, no copy is being encoded into the model. There is currently no intellectual property right invoked merely by training a model-- if people want there to be, and it isn’t an unreasonable thing to want (though I don’t agree it’s good policy), then a new type of intellectual property right will need to be created.
What’s actually baffling to me is that these pieces presumably are all effectively public domain as they’re authored by AI. And they’re clearly digital in nature, so wtf are people actually buying?