Christie’s First-Ever AI Art Auction Earns $728,000, Plus Controversy

Better than 5,600 artists signed an open letter protesting the public sale, announcing that the works aged AI fashions that are trained on copyrighted work.

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Synthetic intelligence and art relish been controversial for years. So it’s no surprise that Christie’s confronted protests over its first-ever AI-devoted public salewhich the public sale home says used to be the first ever from any predominant public sale home, confronted protests. In February, better than 5,600 artists signed an open letter asking Christie’s to cancel the sale.

“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 open letter reads in fragment. “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.”

A manual for Christie’s shared a direct about the mission.

“From the beginning, two things have been true about the art world: one, artists are inspired by what came before them, and two, art can spark debate, discussion, and controversy,” the direct reads. “The discussions around digital art, including art created using AI technology, are not new and in many ways should be expected. Many artists — Pop artists, for example — have been the subject of similar discussions. Having said that, Christie’s, a global company with world-class experts, is uniquely positioned to explore the relatively new and ever-changing space of digital art: the artists, collectors, market and challenges.”

The manual additionally pointed to a distinct reception to the public sale on Xformerly Twitter. Artist Daniel Ambrosi tweeted, “So thrilled to have been a part of this unforgettable experience… and delighted that my artwork is going home with someone!”

The general public sale, dubbed Augmented Intelligence, closed Wednesday morning. Better than 30 loads attracted hundreds of bids and brought in $728,784, Christie’s reports. And there is a generational twist: The general public sale home says 37% of registrants were utterly unusual to Christie’s, and 48% of bidders were millennials or contributors of Gen Z.

“The auction redefines the evolution of art and technology, exploring human agency in the age of AI within fine art,” a promotional direct from Christie’s learn. “From robotics to GANs to interactive experiences, artists incorporate and collaborate with artificial intelligence in a variety of mediums including paintings, sculptures, prints, digital art and more.”

(GANs, or generative adversarial networks, are generative AI fashions that make unusual data or photographs that resemble the data they’re trained on.)

The open letter gathered 6,493 signatures, of which 5,646 were verified. The signers vary from illustrators to authors to art therapists to cinematographers, from worldwide locations all across the globe.

The highest mark in the sale used to be $277,200 for a piece by Refik Anadol titled Machine Hallucinations — ISS Dreams — A. It aged a data region of better than 1.2 million photographs taken from the Global Station Region and satellites.

One other work, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s Embedding Peer 1 & 2, offered for $94,500. It used to be the results of a text-to-image mannequin trained on altered photographs of Herndon herself and came to Christie’s following its inclusion in the 2024 Whitney Biennial.