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The event at Christie’s was intended to demonstrate and test the legitimacy of AI artwork within the high-end auction world. It was met with fierce criticism and enthusiasm from different parties.
An online sale of AI-generated artwork at London’s auction house Christie’s has surpassed its initial earnings estimates by 20%.
The total revenue brought in currently sits at $792,000 USD, with a significant number of new collectors entering the art auction world for the first time. Gen Z and Millennial buyers made up just under half of the bidding crowd. A third of registrants said they were ‘completely new to Christie’s.’
Running from February 20 to March 5 2025, the sale included 20 different pieces, all entirely derived from AI. The artists credited include a lineup of contemporary figures who have been experimenting with various different programs and software in order to create convincing images.
These names include Refik Anadol, Pindar Van Arman, Saha Stiles and Holly Herndon, among others.
However, the auction did not go ahead without some sizeable pushback. An open letter was written and published urging Christie’s to not go ahead with the sale, and has been signed by 6,500 artists.
‘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 letter reads. ‘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.’
‘We ask, if you have any respect for human artist, you cancel the auction,’ the letter concludes. Despite this protest, Christie’s did still go ahead with the sale. A spokesperson from Christie’s spoke to The Art Newspaper in response, saying:
‘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.’
Some featured artists have commented themselves, noting that they use AI models that are built from scratch and based on their own information. Ivona Tau told Hypeart that she uses ‘GANs, a family of AI models that allow me to train neural networks from scratch, exclusively on my own data.’
‘AI is an umbrella term that encompasses so many different techniques. What people often don’t realise is that AI is much more than Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT,’ she said.
We’ve recently written about several instances of AI beginning to make its way into mainstream creative project. Activision has been in hot water for incorporating AI into advertisements for potential mobile games, and for openly admitting to using it for assets in big franchise titles like Call Of Duty.
