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Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k

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Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k

#4
I'd buy art (and listen to music) generated by an AI, but I'll admit that I think some creative products lose a bit of their essence when not created by humans.

We know math and science can be found within art: measures and half measures in music, the golden ratio in painting, etc. Optimizing for these mathematical properties seems a bit like cheating for lack of a better word. There are many musicians and artists without classical training that encounter these attributes on their own, and manipulate them in different ways. I think part of the reason why the arts are such a great platform for human creativity is because of this.

Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k

#5
I could see someone paying for the novelty of one of the first well-known AI paintings, but I can imagine supply and demand economics will drive prices way down as more high quality AI art floods the market. Good time to get in though while supply is still low and demand is high.

Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k

#6
"The painting, called Portrait of Edmond Belamy, was created by a Paris-based art collective called Obvious."

Hopefully the person who wrote the code, freely shared it and even helped them to get it running will see some of that ridiculous windfall:

https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073

Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k

#7
post #4

I'd buy art (and listen to music) generated by an AI, but I'll admit that I think some creative products lose a bit of their essence when not created by humans. We know math and science can be found within art: measures and half measures in music, the golden ratio in painting, etc. Optimizing for these mathematical properties seems a bit like cheating for lack of a better word. There are many musicians and artists wi…

>I think some creative products lose a bit of their essence when not created by humans

Does they though? I bet in 10 years, if you walked into an art gallery, you'd still be drawn to certain pieces and not others regardless of wether they were created by human or AI.

As AI improves it will get ever closer to that "hand-made" look to the point we probably won't be able to tell, especially with something with as much intrinsic variety as creativity. In fact, if AI is trying to copy a "human style", we might be able to define how narrow or broad our range of creativity really is.

Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k

#8
post #3

All I can say is "follow the money"... I can see someone paying for the AI program, but not for one of its digital outputs. I'm guessing this is an internal purchase for the news story.

I doubt this. It is more likely just a very wealthy person wanting to buy the first artwork completely done by an AI that hit a major auction house.

That is news, the fact that it is in the news automatically adds to the cache around the piece. That makes for a solid art investment.

Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k

#9
Twitter thread from the author of the original algorithm: https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 (worth reading the whole thread, the art collective reply)

GitHub link: https://github.com/robbiebarrat/art-dcgan The README was last edited 6 months ago and contains the bolded text: "When using any outputs of the models, credit me. Don't sell the outputs of the pre-trained models, modified or not. If you have any questions email me before doing anything."

Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k

#10
post #2

This could be something great if the author of the original algorithm and datasets was given proper credits. https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055360024548012033

I think that people don't seem to understand that most open source licences don't require attribution. If you have released your code according to a licence, what right do you have to complain that people are using that code in accordance with that licence?

In this case though, it looks like Obvious did set out to attribute the original GAN author and Christie's have omitted that.

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