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.
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
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