Christie's First AI Art Auction Sparks Backlash

Thousands of artists are calling on Christie’s to cancel its upcoming “Augmented Intelligence” auction, the first major sale dedicated to art made with artificial intelligence, slated to run from February 20 to March 5.

The auction explores the role of human agency in the age of AI, tracing the evolution of art and technology over several decades. The sale of 20 lots expects to bring in $600,000, with works by Harold Cohen, an early AI art pioneer, alongside a lineup of contemporary artists experimenting with emerging technologies, such as Refik Anadol, Pindar Van Arman, Sasha Stiles, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst.

The open letter, addressed to Christie’s digital art specialists, now contains 4,000 signatures, including artists Karla Ortiz and Kelly McKernan who filed a class-action lawsuit against tech companies for violations of copyright law.

“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,” the letter read. “Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work.”

In response, a spokesperson from Christie’s told The Art Newspaper: “The artists represented in this sale all have strong, existing multidisciplinary art practices, some recognized in leading museum collections. The works in this auction are using artificial intelligence to enhance their bodies of work.”

Following Sotheby’s $1 million USD sale of A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing back in November,  the auction’s announcement has once again reinvigorated the war between AI and anti-AI camps, with artists chiming in online. Featured artist Anadol took to X and called the letter “funny,” mentioning that a majority of the artists are using their own datasets and models. “This is the basic problem of entire art ecosystem, results of lazy critic practices and doomsday hysteria driven dark minds,” he expressed.

“’AI’ is an umbrella term that encompasses so many different techniques. What people often don’t realize is that AI is much more than Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT,” Ivona Tau, another featured artist, told Hypeart. “For example, I use GANs, a family of AI models that allows me to train neural networks from scratch, exclusively on my own data – personal photographs and family archives – without incorporating any copyrighted material at any stage of the process.”