Christie’s auction of art created with AI has been met with outrage from thousands of artists who claim the technology behind the work is “mass theft”.
The Augmented Intelligence art auction has been described by Christie’s as the world’s first AI-dedicated sale by a major auctioneer and is set to feature 20 pieces with prices ranging from A$10,000 to $250,000.
A letter from artists calling for the cancellation of the auction has gained worldwide momentum, garnering almost 6,000 signatures of support.
“Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license,” the letter said.
“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.
“Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivises AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work.
“We ask that, if you have any respect for human artists, you cancel the auction.”
The use of copyrighted work to train generative AI models has become a large source of controversy in the creative industries with authors, publishers and music labels launching a series of lawsuits fighting the alleged copyright.
One of the artists whose art will be sold at the auction, Refik Anadol, took to X to speak out against the auction's backlash.
“This is the basic problem of the entire art ecosystem, the results of lazy critic practices and doomsday hysteria-driven dark minds,” Anadol said.
A spokesperson from Christie’s said that most of the art used to create art in the auction had been trained on the artists’ “own input”.
“The artists represented in this sale all have strong, existing multidisciplinary art practices, some recognised in leading museum collections. The works in this auction are using artificial intelligence to enhance their bodies of work and in most cases AI is being employed in a controlled manner, with data trained on the artists’ own inputs,” the spokesperson said.
The auction is still set to take place in New York on 20 February.