Christie's AI art auction draws big-money bids — and thousands of protests signatures

NBC News

26-02-2025

In Christie's New York gallery, a robot is painting a 10-by-12-foot canvas. It adds more oil paint each time a $100 bid is placed on it. But its creative vision doesn't come from the artist who programmed it.
It comes from a technique called outpainting, which employs artificial intelligence to generate elements that blend with existing content on a canvas. It's just one method used by the 34 works in Christie's latest venture: the first major auction that exclusively features art made using AI.
'We've seen throughout time that there's a lot of artistry in working with mechanical means for creating artwork, " said artist and roboticist Alexander Reben, whose aforementioned painting is up for bidding. "And I think what really matters is your intention and what you do."
The auction house — known for selling fine art, luxury goods, and antiques — opened 'Augmented Intelligence ' on Feb. 20. The sale has raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in bids.
But not everyone is pleased with those results.
'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,' states an open letter addressed to Christie's signed by more than 6,400 artists.
The letter called for the auction to be cancelled. Reid Southen, who helped organize the letter, said he believes a third of the works featured use generative AI models trained on copyrighted works. He named Midjourney, Open AI's Sora, Runway AI and Stable Diffusion as examples.