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.
Artists are inspired by each other.
If I draw something being inspired by e. g. Bansky, and it’s not a direct copy - it’s legal.
We don’t live in a vacuum.
Counterpoints:
Artists also draw distinctions between inspiration and ripping off.
The legality of an act has no bearing on its ethics or morality.
The law does not protect machine generated art.
Machine learning models almost universally utilize training data which was illegally scraped off the Internet (See meta’s recent book piracy incident).
Uncritically conflating machine generated art with actual human inspiration, while career artist generally lambast the idea, is not exactly a reasonable stance to state so matter if factly.
It’s also a tacit admission that the machine is doing the inspiration, not the operator. The machine which is only made possible by the massive theft of intellectual property.
The operator contributes no inspiration. They only provide their whims and fancy with which the machine creates art through mechanisms you almost assuredly don’t understand. The operator is no more an artist than a commissioner of a painting. Except their hired artist is a bastard intelligence made by theft.
And here they are, selling it for thousands.