This week Christie's is running its inaugural AI art auction. With the title Augmented Intelligence, it is billed as the first ever artificial intelligence-dedicated sale at a major auction house and has a raised vociferous protest from thousands of artists who regard the technology behind the works as committing "mass theft". 

Back in 2018 I reported on Christie's inclusion in an auction of an AI-Generated artwork which it then claimed as a first for a major auction house. What I found disturbing at that time was that  Christie's appeared to attribute the same sort of value to a crudely drawn portrait in oils in the style of the late 18th century produced by an algorithm as would be realized by a portrait created  "real" old master. In the event the AI-assisted portrait of Edmond de Belamy, created by the French collective Obvious, fetched a staggering $432,500, vindicating Christie's belief that there was market value in AI-Generated art.

The inexorable rise of AI intervention in every aspect of productivity raises important concerns when it comes to the creative arts, be that music, literature, poetry, sculpture and painting. How can we value something that was executed within a matter of minutes and that can be reproduced at the touch of a button. Such works could be labelled "No stress or passion was involved in the creation of this product". How can Christie's justify the huge sums of money that expect to change hands for the 20 lots in the auction which have estimates from $10,000 to $250,000?

Now Christie's is about to open the bidding in the first sale dedicated entirely to works that rely on AI despite being urged by over six thousand signatories to an open letter to cancel the auction.

The letter from "the undersigned artists" who number well over five thousand individuals is addressed to Nicole Sales Giles, Christie's Director of Digital Art and Sebastian Sanchez, Digital Art Manger, jointly the auction's organizers, and argues that:

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. 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 incentivizes AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work.

It concludes:

We ask that, if you have any respect for human artists, you cancel the auction.

Refuting the main claim made in the letter, 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". On the other hand Ed Newton-Rex, a key figure in an earlier campaign by creative professionals for protection of their work and a signatory to the letter, said at least nine of the works in the auction appeared to have used models trained on artists' work. Of course this is mostly nonsense as a single artist is unlikely to have enough work to train a big neural network. It is more likely that what happened is that a foundational model was fine-tuned on the artist's output - leaving room for all sorts of data to be used in the creation of the foundational model.

Christie's hasn't cancelled the auction and we need to refer to the blog post, published the day before the open letter, to discover what Giles and Sanchez think about the use of AI technology in art.

The blog post addresses the question, What is AI art?" and states:

In simple terms, artificial intelligence art (AI art) is any form of art that has been created or enhanced with AI tools. Many artists use the term ‘collaboration’ when describing their process with AI.

and quote Giles as saying:

 "AI is not a substitute for human creativity. It enhances the human spectrum of creativity. It’s about employing technology to push what is possible, exploring what is achievable outside of, but not separate from, human agency."

The quote from Sanchez suggests that he too sees the role of the human artist as paramount:

"AI art is so fascinating, because you see artists bending the technology to their will. They’re putting restraints in place, building parameters and then letting AI run free within those boundaries."

The blog post also showcases some of the lots in the auction and introduces the human artists behind them. Below you can see 2 lots from Berlin-based Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, the first digital artists ever to be invited by OpenAI to explore text-to-image prompts via DALL-E. They were commissioned  to create the interactive series dubbed xhairymutantx as the only AI work in the 2024 Whitney Biennale and it is two works from this set are included in the auction:

Embedding Study 1 & 2 minted on 5 February 2025.
Thermal dye diffusion transfer prints. Each: 47¾ × 71⅝ in. Estimate: $70,000-90,000. 

Another of the show cased artworks is attributed to Keke, an AI agent that acts as an autonomous artist, creating her own works based on a predetermined logic.

Keke, Golden Breath
(i) Acrylic and oil on linen; 19 7/10 x 23⅗ in Executed in 2025
(ii) JPEG; 8,000 x 6,613 pixels, minted on 4 February 2025. Estimate: $15,000-20,000.

This work exemplifies Giles' opinion that: 

AI art is about a new artistic process, one that happens in collaboration with technology.

But it clearly demonstrates the undeniable fact that Keke has learnt its trade from existing art created by artists past and present. And it isn't right that there is no reward in this obviously lucrative marketplace for the living artists whose data is being used without their consent.

What is more. to repeat what I wrote earlier. a perusal of the artwork reveals that "No stress or passion was involved in the creation of this product" is a good way to sum up the current efforts. The works range from bizarre to simplistic. 

Augmented Intelligence run as an online sale from February 20 to March 5. There is a concurrent exhibition of AI Art at the Rockefeller Centre.

More Information

Augmented Intelligence - Catalog 

What Is AI Art?

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AI-Generated Painting Sells For $432,500 - A Deep Misunderstanding

Christies To Auction AI-Generated Artwork

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