Christie's has organized an auction dedicated to art created using artificial intelligence. Titled "Augmented Intelligence" and starting on February 20, the auction comprises 20 lots, priced between $10,000 to $250,000. In addition to including works by artists including Refik Anadol and the late AI art pioneer Harold Cohen, the auction's centerpiece is a robot that will paint its canvas in real-time, guided by the auction process. Unsurprisingly, some people aren't happy about it and are taking action to get the auction house to call off the event.

At the time of writing, a letter petitioning for the cancellation of the Augmented Intelligence auction has garnered 5,993 signatures, including artists currently suing AI companies for copyright infringement, under the argument that the tech firms are using theirs and other artists' works for commercial purposes without permission. In the letter, the artists state that several pieces to be auctioned "were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license."

This argument has been resisted by Christie and some artists working with AI. Christie's has defended the auction, clarifying that "in most cases", the artists used models trained on their work to produce the auctioned pieces. Featured artists Mat Dryhurst and Refik Anadol have also spoken against the criticism. Anadol clarified that his piece, "ISS Dreams," uses a technology trained on widely used, publicly available NASA datasets and dismissed the criticism as the result of "lazy critic practices and doomsday hysteria". Mat Dryhurst remarked that going after artists experimenting with new technologies unfairly takes the attention away from the more important debate regarding companies and public policymaking.