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.
hard disagree on that one… the look of the image was, but the inspiration itself was derived from a prompt: the idea is the human; the expression of the idea in visual form is the computer. we have no problem saying a movie is art, and crediting much of that to the director despite the fact that they were simply giving directions
you can’t on 1 hand say that legality is irrelevant and then call it when you please
or argue that a human takes inputs from their environment and produces outputs in the same way. if you say a human in an empty white room and exposed them only to copyright content and told them to paint something, they’d also entirely be basing what they paint on those works. we wouldn’t have an issue with that
what’s the difference between a human and an artificial neural net? because i disagree that there’s something special or “other” to the human brain that makes it unable to be replicated. i’m also not suggesting that these work in the same way, but we clearly haven’t defined what creativity is, and certainly haven’t written off that it could be expressed by a machine
in modern society we tend to agree that Duchamp changed the art world with his piece “Fountain” - simply a urinal signed “R. Mutt”… he didn’t sculpt it himself, he did barely anything to it. the idea is the art, not the piece itself. the idea was the debate that it sparked, the questions with no answer. if a urinal purchased from a hardware store can be art, then the idea expressed in a prompt can equally be art
and to be clear, i’m not judging any of these particular works based on their merits - i haven’t seen them, and i don’t believe any of them should be worth $250k… but also, the first piece of art created by AI: perhaps its value is not in the image itself, but the idea behind using AI and its status as “first”. the creativity wasn’t the image; the creativity and artistic intent was the process
Sorry, I might have went a bit ham on you there, it was late at night. I think I might have been rude
Intellectual property theft used to be legal, but protections were eventually put in place to protect the industry of art. (I’m not a staunch defender if the laws as they are, and I belive it actually, in many cases, stifles creativity.)
I bring up the law not recognizing machine generated art only to dismiss the idea that the legal system agrees wholeheartedly with the stance that AI art is defensibly sold on the free market.
A) To suggest a machine neutral network “thinks like a human” is like suggesting a humanoid robot “runs like a human.” It’s true in an incredibly broad sense, but carries so little meaning with it.
Yes, ai models use advanced, statistical multiplexing of parameters, which can metaphorically be compared to neurons, but only metaphorically. It’s just vaguely similar. Inspired by, perhaps.
B) It hardly matters if AI can create art. It hardly even matters if they did it in exactly the way humans do.
Because the operator doesn’t have the moral or ethical right to sell it in either case.
If the AI is just a stocastic parrot, then it is a machine of theft leveraged by the operator to steal intellectual labor.
If the AI is creative in the same way as a person, then it is a slave.
I’m not actually against AI art, but I am against selling it, and I respect artists for trying to protect their industry. It’s sad to see an entire industry of workers get replaced by machines, and doubly sad to see that those machines are made possible by the theft of their work. It’s like if the automatic loom had been assembled out of centuries of collected fabrics. Each worker non consensually, unknowingly, contributing to the near total destruction of their livelihood. There is hardly a comparison which captures the perversion of it.
i wasn’t meaning to suggest that it thinks like a human - simply that the processes are similar enough, and humans aren’t non-replicable… in which case there is some process behind creativity, and that process is some sort of input, processing via our neural processes, and some output. the intent was to say that AI having the possibility of creativity shouldn’t be dismissed off-hand just because it’s not human
is it though? does creativity rely on being able to interpret the concept of freedom? i think creativity can be divorced from a sense of self, and thus any idea of slavery except in the sense of anthropisation from a 3rd party
why though? if the art is the inspiration and intent, then the prompt is the art and the image itself is only the expression of that inspiration and intent - all are essential parts of the piece
agree and disagree there - it’s sad that a huge amount of artists that have devoted their lives to honing their craft are now less able to make money from using their skills… on the other hand, it’s the democratisation of skills. AI art allows more people to communicate their ideas without the need for skill
I’m afraid that we seen to disagree on who an artist is and what is a valid moral trade off.
Is it really the democratization of art? Or the commodification of art?
Art has, with the exception of extraordinary circumstances, always been democratic. You could at any point pick up a pencil and draw.
Ai has funneled that skill, critically through theft, into a commodified product, the ai model. Through with they can make huge profits.
The machine does the art. And, even when run on your local machine the model was almost certainly trained on expensive machines through means you could not personally replicate.
I find it alarming that people are so willing to celebrate this. It’s like throwing a party that you can buy bottled Nestle water at the grocery store which was taken by immoral means. It’s nice for you, but ultimately just further consolation of power away from individuals.
He did (possibly). Sorry.
Duchamp was a sculptor, as well as a painter, and Fountain doesn’t match any of the urinals sold at the time, by his named source or other plumbing suppliers. Every example in a gallery is a replica made based on a photo of the original, which he claimed to have lost, and they’re all different (the placement and pattern of the drianage holes, the indented ring around the ‘foot’ of the piece).
Same with In Advance of a Broken Arm and a bunch of his other Readymades - attempts to find an identical, commercially available, object have failed.
There’s an argument, outlined here: https://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_3/Collections/rrs/shearer.htm, the Duchamp either made or excessively modified every object he claimed he bought and displayed unchanged.
Therein lies the problem for art students decades later: because his Readmades were/were based on everyday ephemera, few to no examples of other objects in that category remain for us to compare.
I think he was pointing out how few of us look at the objects around us (especially those, like art critics, whose job it is to observe) - if we were paying attention, would we have noticed that his work wasn’t what he claimed? Or maybe it’s a case of not noticing the art in the world around us until we put it in the special “art room”.
Either way, Duchamp is a fascinating artist and (IMO) a compete troll, and may not be the best example to use to defend generative AI.
i think it’s still a good example, and the point stands - it kinda doesn’t really matter if he did sculpt them or not - either way, it’s the fact that he was a troll, the unknowns, the ideas that is what makes the art; not the piece itself