Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 146 posts

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

#111

Post by itronitron »

dkural wrote: post #108
kleopullin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there is an important difference between art that people will go to see in a gallery, museum, or in public, and art that is bought at auction. I have no interest in seeing AI generated paintings either at home or in a gallery, but I would go to an art museum specifically to see Fountain by Duchamp. Fountain encourages people to appreciate the world around them by taking an everyday readymade and probably overlooked object and placing it in a gallery where they can see it more fully.

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

#112

Post by baddox »

dkural wrote: post #108
kleopullin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Erased de Kooning is a much more obvious example. The artist erased a drawing from another artist, resulting in a mostly blank piece of white paper.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erased_de_Kooning_Drawing

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

#113

Post by stevep98 »

The artwork should have been generated during the auction itself, with individual bids being seeds into the generative process. The bidders would contribute to the next generation. You wouldn't know what the final product would be. But, you'd own each of the steps in the process, not just the final image.

You heard it here first!

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

#114

Post by Pristina »

rococode wrote: post #106
bobthepanda wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

You know, arts and bitcoins are alike in this way.

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

#116

Post by justinator »

itronitron wrote: post #111
dkural wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there is an important difference between art that people will go to see in a gallery, museum, or in public, and art that is bought at auction. I have no interest in seeing AI generated paintings either at home or in a gallery, but I would go to an art museum specifically to see Fountain by Duchamp. Fountain encourages people to appreciate the world around them by taking an everyday readymade and probably over…

What's fun about Fountain is the the original has been lost, so you can only see a, "recreation" of it. Since it was initially just a found object of a mass-produced item, this wasn't a problem - but still, Duchamp could sanction "official" replicas.

Ah, love it.

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

#117

Post by tedeh »

nl wrote: post #83
spongepoc wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to see where anyone is being 'taken advantage' of here. If you put your code on github with an open license, you are letting people to have their way with it. This is like if Tim Berners Lee were mad that Google 'stole' his internet and made a lot of money off it. Also the DCGAN architecture is from Chintala et al, and that itself is based on work by Goodfellow et al. Where does this end? Does Robbie Barrat…

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.

Average peoples sense of entitlement when it comes to exploiting others freely given work probably comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever put anything open source up on Github or anywhere else.

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

#118

Post by karlerss »

delinka wrote: post #69
crucialfelix wrote: post #63

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…

Somewhat related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...

> narrator/reviewer considers Menard's fragmentary Quixote (which is line-for-line identical to the original) to be much richer in allusion than Cervantes's "original" work because Menard's must be considered in light of world events since 1602.

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

#119

Post by ForrestN »

An interesting phenomenon is happening vis a vis the art market. Very rich tech buyers are catapulting the value of artists (and, I guess, AI collectives) that aren't really participating much in the "contemporary art" discourse. I look at current art shows all day every day from all over the world and have never heard anything about these people. It's the same with the various "crypto artists."

For $400k you could buy a dozen works by some really influential artists. But there's a big pool of money willing to buy work made by some 25 year olds that is totally disconnected from any broader cultural apparatus related to art. I'm fascinated, and wonder how the art world will respond. Clearly there is money to be made.

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

#120

Post by TangoTrotFox »

Luc wrote: post #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

Unfortunately I do not think this is realistic. When somebody puts code out for free, without any binding restrictions on its use, they should not expect to be privy to profits generated from that code. Often times they'll struggle to even receive credit.

I don't say this because its my personal view -- every open source project I've used I try to contribute to in one way or another, and actively ensure that the author's receive fair credit even when their license does not require as such. But my view is based on reality. There are many people that are not like this. You give them something and they will simply take it. The actual creator or provider of what was given will be out of their mind before nightfall. Or in a work environment you may see people work themselves to death trying to get ahead only to find out that the person one notch ahead of them on the hierarchy had been happily taking credit for everything they were doing, and reaping all the accolades for such.

This is something that I think people should consider much more carefully before deciding to make their code freely available. You may indeed make society a better place, but there's a very good chance that you will receive no credit, let alone reward, for your role in it. If you consider that acceptable then take it a step further to consider that somebody else will, not infrequently, end up taking credit and reward for your work. If people were naturally driven to always want to reciprocate with reasonable value, the history of our species would be rather different.

Post reply on HN