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

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101–110 of 146 posts

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

#101
post #92
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the "taken advantage of" thing is more about the crappy way they behaved on the Github issues ("really disappointing") etc than the idea of using his code.

Of the whole thing, this is what struck me as distasteful. Manipulative and degrading. The French kids owe the Stanford kid like half to all of it.

The French "kids" are 25y afaik.

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

#102
post #32

I 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…

Robbie had first mover advantage to enter the art world but apparently chose not to, or was less successful. The general story of most tech is that the original creators are too focused on their work to identify how to wrap it up for profit.

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

#103
post #30

I wonder if the person who bought it will sue for damages when the AI program is inevitably used to spit out millions of similar portraits on demand.

Why would or could they? It's a digital print created by a computer algorithm. Computer algorithms can't own copyrights, so you can print your own.

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

#105
post #69

The work of Art is the act of putting it up for auction on Christie's. That's what makes it a conceptual piece that is being discussed. People often mistake art for a form of labor production. They expect that labor has to have been performed to create value. But that all changed in the early 20th century. I really feel bad for Dr. Beef, this must really hurt. But according to the twitter thread ( https://twitter.com…

"...they still could have just rewritten the same code and it would have escaped the licensing." I may be misinterpreting your intent, but this seems disingenuous to me. I can't go look at the Linux kernel, then 'rewrite' [the same code] with my fingers and keyboard to escape copyright ownership of Linux kernel contributors. I can rewrite code that implements a described process. Or code that implements a described i…

I mean new code that implements the same process. But in reality I mean people who take code and rewrite it just enough to obscure where it came from. It is totally disingenuous and immoral and all too common.

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

#106
post #32

I 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)

YC actually funded a company that does art investments! Arthena, YC W17. Not sure about tax stuff but it's definitely becoming popular as way to make safe investments, given that paintings by well-established (dead) artists don't tend to lose value.

https://arthena.com/

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

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This dude set up a "this is for free" sign and then some other dudes just swooped in saying "we'll take all of this" and then just replaced the sign with "$500k". The problem with this is that it disincentivizes the sharing mentality. Nobody wants to be the guy who gets taken advantage of, yet everyone benefits from free sharing of knowledge. And then once in a while you have dudes who swoop in and make everyone look…

>This dude set up a "this is for free" sign and then some other dudes just swooped in saying "we'll take all of this" and then just replaced the sign with "$500k". This loses the important nuance that them swooping in and slapping a price tag on their own use of the implementation doesn't deprive anyone of access to the original on the same terms they were able to access it. No one has lost anything in this scenario.…

Well the author lost trust in the community, he is modifying his licenses and maybe won't make it open at all next time. So perhaps not that far off from the analogy

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

#108
post #32

I 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…

What highly valued work that requires little sophistication to produce have you seen at exhibits and auctions?

Fountain (The Urinal) by Marcel Duchamp. He didn't make the urinal. He found it, decided it was good enough, and got it into an exhibit. There you go.

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

#109

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…

The interesting thing is that you cannot copyright computer-generated images.

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

#110

The results are so amateurish though. What’s with those nasty deconvolution artifacts?

It clearly marks it as early, and as the work of a computer in the public's mind. We'll fondly think of these nasty deconvolution artifacts as retro in the not-too-distant future.
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