Thousands of artists are urging the auction house Christie’s to cancel a sale of art created with artificial intelligence, claiming the technology behind the works is committing “mass theft”.
The Augmented Intelligence auction has been described by Christie’s as the first AI-dedicated sale by a major auctioneer and features 20 lots with prices ranging from $10,000 to $250,000 for works by artists including Refik Anadol and the late AI art pioneer Harold Cohen.
It could of course go up to the scotus and effectively a new right be legislated from the bench, but it is unlikely and the nature of these models in combination with what is considered a copy under the rubric copyright in the US has operated effectively forever means that merely training and deploying a model is almost certainly not copyright infringement. This is pretty common consensus among IP attorneys.
That said, a lot of other very obvious infringement in coming out in discovery in many of these cases. Like torrenting all the training data. THAT is absolutely an infringement but is effectively unrelated to the question of whether lawfully accessed content being used as training data retroactively makes its access unlawful (it really almost certainly doesn’t).