Thousands of artists have signed an open letter opposing Christie’s forthcoming all-A.I. auction, expressing “serious concern” over how the works on offer were created.
Launching on February 20, “Augmented Intelligence” is the first Christie’s auction to comprise entirely of artworks created with artificial intelligence (the auction house was also the first to sell an A.I. artwork in 2018). Artists featured in the sale include Alexander Reben, OpenAI’s first artist-in-residence, the husband-and-wife duo of Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Pinder Van Arman, Refik Anadol, Claire Silver, Linda Dounia, and Harold Cohen, best known for his pioneering A.I. program AARON.
The open letter, however, objects to “many of the artworks” in the sale that it says “were created using A.I. models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license.” It did not specify which works it found to be at issue.
“These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial A.I. products that compete with them,” the letter added.
The missive—which is addressed to Nicole Sales Giles and Sebastian Sanchez, Christie’s VP and digital art director and manager of digital art sales respectively—urges Christie’s to cancel the auction, “if you have any respect for human artists.”
“Your support of these models, and the people who use them,” it reads, “rewards and further incentivizes A.I. companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work.”
As of writing, the letter has garnered more than 3,600 signatures, most of which come from artists, illustrators, photographers, and other creatives. Among them are Karla Ortiz and Kelly McKernan, who, along with illustrator Sarah Andersen, filed a class action lawsuit in 2023 against A.I. companies Midjourney Inc, DeviantArt Inc, and Stability A.I. Ltd, alleging copyright violation.
In response to the letter, a Christie’s spokesperson said over email: “The artists represented in this sale all have strong, existing multidisciplinary art practices, some recognized in leading museum collections. The works in this auction are using artificial intelligence to enhance their bodies of work.”
Dryhurst, speaking to the Guardian, also rejects the letter’s claims. He and Herndon have been vocal in advocating for artists’ rights in the age of A.I.—for one, they co-founded Spawning, a platform that helps artists discover if their work has been used in training datasets and blocks A.I. web scrapers. Their work, including xhairymutantx, their 2024 Whitney Biennial entry on offer at
“Augmented Intelligence,” has sought to interrogate how A.I. is reshaping identity and creativity.
“It is not illegal to use any model to create artwork,” Dryhurst told the Guardian. “I resent that an important debate that should be focused on companies and state policy is being focused on artists grappling with the technology of our time.”
Anadol responded to the open letter on X by highlighting that “majority of the artists in the [auction are] specifically pushing and using their own datasets + their own models!” The new media artist, who just unveiled a massive installation at Kunsthaus Zurich, has also been mindful to train his algorithms on “publicly available datasets.”
“This is the basic problem of entire art ecosystem,” he tweeted, “results of lazy critic practices and doomsday hysteria driven dark minds.”
Other digital artists have similarly weighed in on the missive. On X, Beeple shared a tongue-in-cheek artwork depicting a large robot, with a human on a leash, reading a poster-sized version of the letter, which has been marked up in red. “THE WAR OF ART,” he titled the post.
Jack Butcher, meanwhile, has minted the open letter as an open edition digital artwork, titled “Undersigned Artists.” He described the act as an “inversion: a protest against A.I. art minted as A.I. art,” enfolding “a condemnation of A.I.-generated works trained on unlicensed human labor” into “part of the system it critiques.” He added: “Instead of vanishing into the cycle of outrage, it is fixed, tokenized, and placed within the same marketplace it seeks to disrupt.”