“Christie can take responsibility for a higher standard and commit to these things in a way that supports the artists as a whole, and do not pack these exploitation models in their auction along with the people who are doing things ethically,” said Southen .
Southen, a conceptual artist of the film industry based in Michigan, said that he and many of his colleagues have lost work and that his income is “reduced in half” in the last two years due to AI.
Art is not the only reinforcement of the industry for change. According to a report by the World Economic Forum published last month, 41% of employers hope to reduce their workforce as AI begins to replicate the roles. The sixty -nine percent said they plan to recruit skilled talents in the design and improvement of the AI tool.
But Christie sees AI as a natural progression in art history. Nicole Sales Giles, Digital Art Director of Christie, said she appreciates the debate on the auction as a sign that AI will transform art for the benefit of the industry.
“I am not an copyright lawyer, so I cannot comment on the legality, but from an angle of influence of theft, the artists have been influenced by other artists for centuries,” said Sales Giles.
Many of the artists who appear at the auction used their own data, including personal photography, cured collages and their own poetry, to train their AI models.
“The AI that I have been using for almost 10 years was not trained in the work of other artists,” said digital artist Daniel Ambrosi, whose work is part of the auction. “It wasn’t even created to make art first.”
Ambrosi fed his photography from Central Park to Deepdream from Google at two different scales. The AI recognizes the image and moves the pixels in a hallucinogenic way.
“It is as if it were the leader of a jazz band,” he said. “I write original compositions, and I have this virtuous saxophonist who knows where I go with the song, but it will improvise, surprise and delight.”
