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.
AI-generated art has flooded the internet, and recent shows like Art Basel have included exhibitions that feature AI in some way. The former has amounted to AI slop taking over social media feeds, while these art exhibitions—including the “AI God” painting being auctioned—largely feel like stunts. Still, the Sotheby’s listing represents a major embrace of AI art for the auction house and stance on the debate around if AI can be credited as an artist or inventor at a time when criticism of the concept is heating up—and when software companies are increasingly trying to cash in.
Creatives stand up against AI art
Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, artists have been launching copyright lawsuits against AI companies, denouncing their work being used to train models, and voicing concerns that AI art will devalue their work. Yesterday, perhaps the largest collective action was taken when more than 15,000 visual artists, writers, musicians and other creatives signed an open letter against using creative works for training AI models.
Ed Newton-Rex, the former head of audio at Stability AI who resigned last year over the use of copyrighted content for model training, and who organized the open letter, told The Guardian that artists are “very worried” about the use of the works and impact of AI art.
“There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two—sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third—training data— for free,” he said.
Yesterday, a former OpenAI researcher who spent four years at the company and was responsible for gathering and organizing web data to train ChatGPT told the New York Times the company broke copyright laws. He left the company in August because he “no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit” and is among the first employees from a major AI company to speak out publicly against the use of copyrighted data to train models.
AI art for profit
Beyond the model developers, there’s also a slew of companies in the digital image creation and editing space that are using these models to boost their own businesses and profits. Adobe has integrated AI tools based on these models into its programs like Photoshop. Canva, the company trying to disrupt Adobe, has also leaned heavily into AI, partnering with OpenAI and adding new generative AI features throughout its product. Many are included only in the paid subscription, and the company is counting on them to get users to upgrade from its free offering, especially as Canva increasingly goes after business customers.
Since art is intended to push boundaries, remark on our world, and make us question, a work like AI-da’s “AI God” is doing exactly what art is about. But as the artists protesting the use of their work to train models know, the experimentation with AI and art doesn’t start or end there. Just as quickly as AI art is headlining Sotheby’s, it’s also being embraced by commercial companies.
The role AI will play in art isn’t an easy question. The U.S. patent office earlier this year ruled that AI cannot legally be considered an inventor, and whether or not AI can be considered an artist will continue to be up for debate. Either way, Newton-Rex and the artists pushing back against their work being used to train models have a point. The other pieces of the AI supply chain are worth big money and skyrocketing companies like Nvidia to unprecedented market caps. Why should the data—the works of real people—be available for free, no consent required?
And with that, here’s more AI news.
Sage Lazzaro
sage.lazzaro@consultant.fortune.com
sagelazzaro.com
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