The main article on this is https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/23/18013190/ai-art-portrait..., which predates the auction.
We changed the above url from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45980863 to one that has a bit more info.
Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k
41–50 of 146 posts
Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> what right do you have to complain that people are using that code in accordance with that licence? It’s not legally required to credit the author of the original code, but it’s a jerk move not to do so, especially if the work is primarily not your own. All it does is discourage developers from releasing things open source, which is very bad in the long run.
> but it’s a jerk move...
What on earth are you on about!? The author has every possible opportunity to set out whatever he wants in the license. If he wants anyone who uses it to name their firstborn after him he can put that in there. If he doesn’t then there is absolutely no issue or nothing jerk-like of anyone who follows to the letter he license the author decided to use.
It’s up to the author to specify what he wants, and as long as users follow the license that’s their right.
If you want a license that only allows non commercial usage to be unattributed but requires attribution for commercial usage... then use such a license. Don’t just put it up under a permissive license and rely on calling people jerks when they literally do what you specified and gave them license to do.
> all it does is discourage developers from releasing things open source...
Great! Developers who don’t want others to use their software under an open license shouldn’t be releasing it under an open license in the first place! You have all the control as a creator, don’t give it away and then complain that you gave it away like it’s someone else’s fault for using the license you gave them.
Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k
#43I have sympathy for the author's frustration but they open-sourced their work under a very permissive license. It sounds comical that suddenly something becomes valuable because you hang it in a gold frame, make minor modifications to it and ascribe it some symbolism. But that is exactly how contemporary artworks are done. If you go to exhibits and auctions, it is not uncommon to see highly valued work that requires…
IIRC, isn't art used as a tax dodge these days? That and a giant influx of money from countries that don't historically buy a lot of art (e.g. China)
Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k
#44Is it an actual painting or a print?
It looks like paint-on-canvas to me, but without a zoomed-in shot (perhaps from an angle other than dead-on) it's hard to tell whether it actually is paint-on-canvas or just a printed image that looks like one. So... dunno.
Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 i…
I think there are (at least) two parts to evaluating a creative product. The aesthetics and the context around it. I think AI will do a wonderful job of generating aesthetically pleasing art, but could an AI generate something like Guernica? when you look at Guernica you can feel the pain and trauma behind it, when you learn that Picasso was compelled to create it after Guernica was firebombed it adds something speci…
I fully agree. I believe that AI will be used in the future to pump out aesthetically pleasing, but "meaningless" art. The type of art that would be hung on a living room wall to bring the room together.
I am skeptical how much art by AIs will actually feature in museums and exhibits. High-caliber art is very reliant on its emotional context and the message that the artist is trying to convey with the piece. However, I could see AI art featuring when an artist invents a new algorithm or new AI-based technique. Again, going back to the context of the artist and the piece itself.
Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k
#46Color me extremely unimpressed. I just can't believe someone would pay that much for something... so visually mediocre. When you look at how GANs work, they are incredible for what they are (especially StackGAN / GANs conditioned on some input)... but I just don't think there's any real creativity - or for that matter, intelligence - in GANs yet.
It's one of the first work of art by an AI. Think of how much this fact alone will increase the price of the painting in 200 years.
Ehhhh, but is it really a "work of art"? That's what I take issue with.
Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k
#47Related: I know the authors used a DCGAN implementation (a pre-trained model, it looks like), but is it known what their approach for up-scaling the generated images is? In art generation I've seen GAN output of 128x128, e.g. that is then upscaled with a super-resolution network. Is something similar being done for the "final painting", or is the GAN somehow efficient enough to do large-format output in a decent trai…
I don't know exactly what was used to upscale here, but Progressive Growing of GANs[0] was a breakthrough last year that proved at least 1024x1024 was viably producable. The short explanation is: Train and freeze the most basic layer of the model progressively to "let the network" understand higher resolution concepts one piece at the time, and avoid mode-collapse. The network architecture illustrating this a bit bet…
I think they’ve upscaled using Lanczos resampling and have then done wavelet deconvolution - the thing is furry with artefacts, and looks just like when I push an astronomical image too far.
Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k
#48Color me extremely unimpressed. I just can't believe someone would pay that much for something... so visually mediocre. When you look at how GANs work, they are incredible for what they are (especially StackGAN / GANs conditioned on some input)... but I just don't think there's any real creativity - or for that matter, intelligence - in GANs yet.
It's one of the first work of art by an AI. Think of how much this fact alone will increase the price of the painting in 200 years.
Except it really isn’t - it’s an output of an ML algo designed for one task, which I’d hesitate to call AI.
I had my portrait painted by a robot with a camera and some variety of edge-finding DSP at the London Science Museum in about 1990 - and they touted that as “AI art”.
Also - what about Conway’s game of life? Is that not art?
Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k
#49"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
It isn't required by the license, but it is required by the primate fairness sense. A donation to the open-source project would be appropriate.
Alternatively, the Obvious collective will be now and forevermore tagged as non-contributing leeches. Which will likely not tarnish their enjoyment of their $144k each before auction fees and taxes, but might discourage future AI/ML developers from releasing under such a permissive license in the future.
Re: Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k
#50I have sympathy for the author's frustration but they open-sourced their work under a very permissive license. It sounds comical that suddenly something becomes valuable because you hang it in a gold frame, make minor modifications to it and ascribe it some symbolism. But that is exactly how contemporary artworks are done. If you go to exhibits and auctions, it is not uncommon to see highly valued work that requires…
IIRC, isn't art used as a tax dodge these days? That and a giant influx of money from countries that don't historically buy a lot of art (e.g. China)
How exactly would buying art work as a tax dodge?