Artists Sign Open Letter Protesting Christie’s Upcoming All-A.I. Art Auction
Some artists fear that A.I. models trained on their work will eventually put them out of business, while others are embracing the latest technology in an effort to expand the bounds of human creativity
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Thousands of artists have signed an open letter protesting Christie’s upcoming all-artificial intelligence art auction, citing the “mass theft of human artists’ work” by A.I. companies.
“Augmented Intelligence,” as the sale is known, opens on February 20. According to the auction house’s description, it “redefines the evolution of art and technology, exploring human agency in the age of A.I. within fine art.”
But the more than 6,000 artists who had signed the open letter as of Friday morning find the auction to be an endorsement of work that leeches off human artists and stifles human agency and creativity.
“Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using A.I. models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license,” the open letter reads. “These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial A.I. products that compete with them.”
Enter the world of Augmented Intelligence, Christie's first auction solely offering artworks created with AI. Featuring works from @refikanadol, @clairesilver12, @vanarman, @hollyherndon @matdryhurst and more, the sale challenges us to rethink the limits of artistic agency. pic.twitter.com/MwNZbQPDte
— Christie's (@ChristiesInc) February 7, 2025
Among the signatories are Karla Ortiz and Kelly McKernan, who are suing A.I. companies for using their copyrighted artwork without permission to train image generation software, according to the Guardian’s Dan Milmo.
“Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes A.I. companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work,” the letter concludes.
However, artists involved with the auction are eager to defend their work. They see A.I. as a tool in their repertoire, rather than an easy way to generate images at the expense of their colleagues.
Refik Anadol is a Turkish-American artist whose A.I.-powered works have cracked into the mainstream with exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the United Nations. He says the criticisms are a result of “lazy critic practices and doomsday hysteria driven dark minds,” per a post on X (formerly Twitter).
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He explains to the Guardian that his work ISS Dreams, which is expected to fetch between $150,000 and $200,000 at the auction, is the result of A.I. trained on 1.2 million images from the International Space Station. The images are all part of publicly accessible NASA datasets “that have been used widely by artists for many decades,” he adds.
Similarly, Christie’s frames the auction as an act of faith in human creative potential in the A.I. era. Nicole Sales Giles, Christie’s director of digital art and one of the officials to whom the open letter is addressed, explains in a statement that “A.I. is not a substitute for human creativity. It enhances the human spectrum of creativity.”
“It’s about employing technology to push what is possible, exploring what is achievable outside of, but not separate from, human agency,” Sales Giles adds.
Although it's making more headlines than ever before, A.I. art generation is not a brand new phenomenon. The oldest work appearing at auction comes from Harold Cohen’s AARON program in the 1960s, one of the earliest examples of A.I.-assisted drawing.
But newer programs like Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E are bringing ethical and artistic concerns about non-human work to the forefront of public discourse. The “Augmented Reality” auction, which will likely rake in large sums of money, only heightens the controversy.
The open letter asks that officials cancel the auction if they “have any respect for human artists.” Meanwhile, other A.I. skeptics argue for stronger guardrails regulating the sale of A.I. art at auction houses like Christie’s.
Ed Newton-Rex, the CEO of Fairly Trained, a nonprofit that pushes A.I. companies to use fairer data sourcing practices, says in a post on X that it’s “likely that at least nine or so of the works being sold use models trained on copyrighted work without permission.”
“I don’t blame the artists for this—they’re just using products that A.I. companies have put on the market,” Newton-Rex adds. “But why are Christie’s condoning these models by helping sell these works for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, when the models are directly leading to the impoverishment of so many artists that they’ve stolen from?”
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He suggests that Christie’s remove works that have used models with verifiably unfair sourcing practices.
A Christie’s spokesperson defends the auction, saying that the artists involved used A.I. “in a controlled manner, with data trained on the artists’ own inputs,” according to TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggers.
“It is not illegal to use any model to create artwork,” British artist Mat Dryhurst tells the Guardian. Dryhurst and his wife, Holly Herndon, were the “first digital artists ever to be invited by OpenAI to explore text-to-image prompts via DALL-E,” according to Christie’s. One of their pieces is expected to go for up to $90,000 at the auction.
As Dryhurst tells the Guardian, “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.”
