The upcoming AI art auction at Christie's, titled "Augmented Intelligence", has sparked significant controversy and legal debate within and beyond the art community. Scheduled to open on February 20 at Christie's Rockefeller Center gallery in New York, the auction is being hailed by Christie's as “the first-ever artificial intelligence-dedicated sale at a major auction house”. The event will feature groundbreaking forms of art created or enhanced through the use of AI tools.

One notable example of the works on offer is a series of canvases titled "Emerging Faces" by Pindar Van Arman. This series has been produced using intricately trained robots to explore how early a face imagined by AI can be recognised as a face.

While Christie's aims to showcase how AI can empower artists and expand creative horizons, there has been a significant outcry. To date, over 5,000 artists have signed an open letter accusing the auction house of promoting artworks created using AI models trained on copyrighted works without a licence. These artists describe the auction as “mass theft” and are calling for its cancellation, stating that such AI models exploit human artists by using their work without permission to build commercial AI products that compete with them.

The reaction to this auction is but one facet of the ongoing debate surrounding AI's immense potential and the crucial need to protect human creativity and comes at the same time the UK government is consulting on the controversial Data (Use and Access) Bill. The discussion will undoubtedly persist as the art world grapples with the ethical and legal implications of AI-generated works.