Art Auction

‘Can AI be an artist?’ A Sotheby’s auction tests the answer, while human artists protest AI training

October 24, 20245 Mins Read


Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In today’s edition…The embrace (and protest) of AI art reaches a new level; Hugging Face is caught hosting thousands of malware-infected models; Anthropic’s updated Claude model marks a step toward AI assistants; and Character.Ai faces a lawsuit over a 14-year-old’s suicide.

Global auction house Sotheby’s is gearing up for its first-ever auction of an artwork created by an “AI artist.”

The work—a portrait of AI pioneer Alan Turing titled “AI God”—was created by a humanoid robot using a combination of AI algorithms, cameras in her (the robot presents female) eyes, and a robotic arm. Unlike most AI art that’s generated digitally by text-to-images models, Ai-Da, as the humanoid robot is called, actually painted the canvas as well, according to CBS News.

This isn’t the first artwork created by an AI model to go to auction with a major auction house. In 2018, Christie’s auctioned off a work called “Portrait of Edmond de Belamy” that was created by an AI model, printed to canvas, and sold for $432,500, way above initial estimates. But it is a first for Christie’s rival Sotheby’s—and the humanoid robot actually painting the portrait adds another layer to AI acting as an artist. Sotheby’s expects the work to sell for between $120,000 and $180,000.

AI-generated art has flooded the internet, and recent shows like Art Basel have included exhibitions that feature AI in some way. The former has amounted to AI slop taking over social media feeds, while these art exhibitions—including the “AI God” painting being auctioned—largely feel like stunts. Still, the Sotheby’s listing represents a major embrace of AI art for the auction house and stance on the debate around if AI can be credited as an artist or inventor at a time when criticism of the concept is heating up—and when software companies are increasingly trying to cash in.

Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, artists have been launching copyright lawsuits against AI companies, denouncing their work being used to train models, and voicing concerns that AI art will devalue their work. Yesterday, perhaps the largest collective action was taken when more than 15,000 visual artists, writers, musicians and other creatives signed an open letter against using creative works for training AI models.

Ed Newton-Rex, the former head of audio at Stability AI who resigned last year over the use of copyrighted content for model training, and who organized the open letter, told The Guardian that artists are “very worried” about the use of the works and impact of AI art.



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