In spite of an open letter signed by over 6,500 artists, demanding the cancellation of Augmented Intelligence – Christie’s artificial intelligence (AI) art auction that ran from February 20 to March 5 – the event was a commercial success, bringing in more than US$728,000, with 28 of the 34 displayed pieces sold.
The letter, written to auction hosts Nicole Sales Giles and Sebastian Sanchez, stated: “Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a licence. These models … exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them.
“Your support of these models … rewards and further incentivises AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work.”
But it should be said that not all artists are against the use of AI – there are those in Hong Kong who fully embrace it and even make it their primary creative medium. Bianca Tse, for instance, believes there is a lot of misunderstanding surrounding AI art and the technology behind it. For example, high-profile artists like Refik Anadol, whose work was featured in the auction, train their models using their own work or data sets, where the copyright claims should “clearly” belong to the artist.
“My understanding of commercial AI models is that they don’t target specific artists’ works, but are trained on vast data sets comprising trillions of images from various sources,” Tse explains. “The AI learns to imagine and create – much like how a human artist learns by observing and interpreting the world around them.”
Tse, who graduated from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design, says her big turning point came when she stopped seeing AI as a threat and started viewing it as a “powerful creative partner”.
Liza Dorrer, who is completing her PhD at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), and teaches specialised courses on AI image-generation tools Midjourney and Stable Diffusion for interior designers and architects, believes that the debate on whether AI art is “real” art comes down to the technology behind the tools.
