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 Anadol and the late AI art pioneer Harold Cohen.
A letter 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.
The letter says: “Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a licence. 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 use of copyrighted work to train AI models – the technology that underpins chatbots and image generation tools such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney – has become a battleground between creatives and tech companies, with artists, authors, publishers and music labels launching a series of lawsuits alleging breach of copyright.
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. The works in this auction are using artificial intelligence to enhance their bodies of work and in most cases AI is being employed in a controlled manner, with data trained on the artists’ own inputs,” said the spokesperson.
A British artist whose work features in the auction, Mat Dryhurst, said he cared about the issue of art and AI “deeply” and rejected the criticisms in the letter. A piece by Dryhurst and his wife, Holly Herndon – based on a work called xhairymutantx – is on sale at the auction with an estimated price of between $70,000 and $90,000.
Dryhurst told the Guardian that the piece of art being auctioned was part of an exploration of how the “concept” of his wife appeared in publicly available AI models.
“This is of interest to us and we have made a lot of art exploring and attempting to intervene in this process as is well within our rights.”
He added: “It is not illegal to use any model to create artwork. I resent that an important debate that should be focused on companies and state policy is being focused on artists grappling with the technology of our time.”
Anadol also rejected the criticism. In a post on X, he said the backlash was a consequence of “lazy critic practices and doomsday hysteria”.
