'Mass theft': Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled

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 Andanol and the late AI art pioneer Harold Cohen. A lettter calling for the auction to be scrapped has received 3,000 signatures, including from Karla Ortiz and Kelly McKernan, who are suing AI companies over claims that the firms' image generation tools have used their work without permission. 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." Calling on Christie's to cancel the auction, which starts on 20 February, it adds: "Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies' mass theft of human artists' work." The British composer Ed Newton-Rex, 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 in the auction do not appear to have used such models. 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 artists represented in this sale all have strong, existing multidisciplinary art practices, some recognised in leading museum collections.