As Christie's auction house planned the first-ever auction dedicated to AI-generated art works, over 5,600 people signed an online letter urging them to cancel it. "Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license," the letter complained.
"These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them. Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies' mass theft of human artists' work." CNET reports that the signers "range from illustrators to authors to art therapists to cinematographers, from countries all across the globe."

Christie's ignored them all and held the auction anyways. So what happened when it was over on Wednesday morning?

More than 30 lots attracted hundreds of bids and brought in $728,784, Christie's reports. And there's a generational twist: The auction house says 37% of registrants were completely new to Christie's, and 48% of bidders were millennials or members of Gen Z... The highest price in the sale was $277,200 for a work by Refik Anadol titled Machine Hallucinations — ISS Dreams — A. It used a data set of more than 1.2 million images taken from the International Space Station and satellites.

ARTnews reports that the auction actually brought in more than Christie's had expected:
The sale, which made up of 34 lots, had an 82 percent sell through rate... While some digital artists, including Beeple, championed the sale, others decried it as emblematic of the ongoing struggle between human artistry and machine-driven innovation. The results, however, suggest that AI art — controversial as it may be — is carving a firm place in the market.

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