When Art Created by Artificial Intelligence Sells, Who Gets Paid?

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Christie’s will auction off an artificial intelligence (AI) artwork for the first time this October, hard on the heels of a pioneering all-AI art exhibition held at New Delhi gallery Nature Morte. While the market is eager to move the work, the field raises questions about ownership, obsolescence, and the art world jobs that algorithms can’t do.

What is AI art?

Many makers of AI art use generative adversarial networks (GANs), technology that allows a computer to study a library of images or sounds, make its own content according to what it has learned, test its own success against the original media, and then try again, improving incrementally through trial and error.

The artworks resulting from this back-and-forth between two artificial neural networks—which include prints on paper, videos, and multimedia installations—are often disquietingly lifelike, the flora and fauna of the uncanny valley.

Munich-based Mario Klingemann, for instance, trained an algorithm on portraits of Old Masters paintings before exposing it to webcam footage of himself. The process results in a video of melting, many-eyed grotesques that are often compared to the works of Francis Bacon.

Selling AI art

London-based Turkish artist Memo Akten was among the first artists to sell an AI artwork, with his GCHQ fetching $8,000 at a charity auction Google hosted in San Francisco in 2016. Two years later, Christie’s is preparing to auction off its first AI artwork: a piece by Paris-based collective Obvious, entitled Portrait of Edmond Belamy (2018), which is expected to go for a figure between $8,000 and $11,500.

In some respects, AI art is like any other nascent form trying to elbow out some space in the art market. Aparajita Jain, the co-director of Nature Morte, says she priced the works in the gallery’s recent “Gradient Descent” exhibition “quite aggressively,” from $500 to $40,000, to help establish AI art as a genre. That’s an entry point markedly lower than the gallery’s usual $10,000 to $100,000 range.

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