Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In today’s edition…The embrace (and protest) of AI art reaches a new level; Hugging Face is caught hosting thousands of malware-infected models; Anthropic’s updated Claude model marks a step toward AI assistants; and Character.Ai faces a lawsuit over a 14-year-old’s suicide.
Global auction house Sotheby’s is gearing up for its first-ever auction of an artwork created by an “AI artist.”
The work—a portrait of AI pioneer Alan Turing titled “AI God”—was created by a humanoid robot using a combination of AI algorithms, cameras in her (the robot presents female) eyes, and a robotic arm. Unlike most AI art that’s generated digitally by text-to-images models, Ai-Da, as the humanoid robot is called, actually painted the canvas as well, according to CBS News.
This isn't the first artwork created by an AI model to go to auction with a major auction house. In 2018, Christie’s auctioned off a work called "Portrait of Edmond de Belamy" that was created by an AI model, printed to canvas, and sold for $432,500, way above initial estimates. But it is a first for Christie's rival Sotheby's—and the humanoid robot actually painting the portrait adds another layer to AI acting as an artist. Sotheby’s expects the work to sell for between $120,000 and $180,000.
