Artists seek to stop Christie’s from auctioning AI art because it’s “theft”

Thousands of artists have come together to demand that the renowned auction house Christie’s cancel its upcoming sale of AI-generated artwork, arguing that AI technology is being used to commit “mass theft” of human creativity.

The controversy has intensified as concerns grow over AI models trained on copyrighted works without artists’ consent. This is not the first case reflecting conflict over the use of AI technology in the art and entertainment industry with artists complaining over various issues like copyright infringement.

About 3,000 artists’ signatures against Christie’s were recorded.

Christie’s has described the Augmented Intelligence auction as the first AI-dedicated sale by a major auctioneer. According to The Guardian, the auction 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.

About 3,000 signatures have been put on a letter calling for the auction to be scrapped. Among the signatories are Karla Ortiz and Kelly McKernan, who have taken AI companies to court on allegations that the firm’s image-generation tools have used their work without their consent.

“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.”

The letter.

According to The Guardian, the letter added that the support of these models and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work. Christie’s auction is to be held on February 20, 2025.

The use of copyrighted work to train AI models, the technology that underpins chatbots and image generation tools such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, has become a battleground between creatives and tech companies, with artists, authors, publishers, and music labels launching a series of lawsuits alleging breach of copyright.

A spokesperson for Christie’s said that “in most cases” the AI used to create art in the auction had been trained on the artists’ “own inputs.”

The use of copyrighted material to train AI models that support chatbots and image-generation tools has become topical and spilled into courts as authors, publishers, record labels and musicians launch lawsuits against AI firms over copyright infringement.

In one of the prominent cases, a group of authors took Meta to court in 2023 on allegations that the social media company was misusing their books to train AI models, specifically Llama, its large language model that powers its chatbots.

Christie’s argue AI is enhancing art

Ed Newton-Rex the British composer, a key figure in the campaign by creative professionals for protection of their work and a signatory to the letter, said at least nine of the works appearing in the auction appeared to have used models trained on artists’ work.

However, other pieces on the auction do not appear to have used such models.

Christie’s spokesperson said: “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 and in most cases AI is being employed in a controlled manner, with data trained on the artists’ own inputs.”

Christie’s spokesperson.

Anadol also rejected the criticism. In a post on X, he said the backlash was a consequence of “lazy critic practices and doomsday hysteria.”

Mat Dryhurst, a British artist whose work features in the auction said he cared about the issue of art and AI “deeply” and rejected the criticisms in the letter.

A piece by Dryhurst and his wife, Holly Herndon based on a work called xhairymutantx is on sale at the auction with an estimated price of between $70,000 and $90,000.

Dryhurst added that the piece of art being auctioned was part of an exploration of how the concept of his wife appeared in publicly available AI models.

“This is of interest to us and we have made a lot of art exploring and attempting to intervene in this process as is well within our rights.”

“It is not illegal to use any model to create artwork. I resent that an important debate that should be focused on companies and state policy is being focused on artists grappling with the technology of our time,” he added.

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