A painting by Ai-Da Robot, a humanoid robot powered using artificial intelligence (AI), sold for more than $1m (including auction house fees) at Sotheby’s New York on Thursday (7 November). The painting is the most valuable artwork ever sold by a robot artist, according to the auction house, driven up by 27 bids.
The painting A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing (2024) depicts Alan Turing, the English mathematician and Second World War cryptanalyst who is remembered as a pioneer of AI and computer science. The work was displayed earlier this year at a United Nations global summit on AI in Geneva.
I know commenters will probably be outraged by this sale, but to me this is just the status quo of the modern art scene. The high end art scene hasn’t been about appreciating the art itself since Andy Warhol (at least). The scene is just a bunch of people with too much money all pretending to be intellectuals to each other and buying garbage to prove how deep and meaningful it is. There’s probably also an element of money funny business as well, but I’m not versed enough to say the exact mechanisms, just that I feel in my bones that when people are trading around multi-million dollar paintings among other people in the scene that I am suspicious. There is as much personal expression and meaning in the AI creation as there is in most other pieces being pumped out.
I have exactly as much respect for the AI art generator as I do for the rest of the human high end artists churning out junk for rich people.