12 ms·

Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k

187 points by monkeydust 8y ago

Zero2Ten 8y ago
This could be something great if the author of the original algorithm and datasets was given proper credits. https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055360024548012033 https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055360024548012033
- timClicks 8y ago
  I think that people don't seem to understand that most open source licences don't require attribution. If you have released your code according to a licence, what right do you have to complain that people are using that code in accordance with that licence? In this case though, it looks like Obvious did set out to attribute the original GAN author and Christie's have omitted that.
  - minimaxir 8y ago
    > what right do you have to complain that people are using that code in accordance with that licence? It’s not legally required to credit the author of the original code, but it’s a jerk move not to do so, especially if the work is primarily not your own. All it does is discourage developers from releasing things open source, which is very bad in the long run.
    - talltimtom 8y ago
      > but it’s a jerk move... What on earth are you on about!? The author has every possible opportunity to set out whatever he wants in the license. If he wants anyone who uses it to name their firstborn after him he can put that in there. If he doesn’t then there is absolutely no issue or nothing jerk-like of anyone who follows to the letter he license the author decided to use. It’s up to the author to specify what he wants, and as long as users follow the license that’s their right. If you want a license that only allows non commercial usage to be unattributed but requires attribution for commercial usage... then use such a license. Don’t just put it up under a permissive license and rely on calling people jerks when they literally do what you specified and gave them license to do. > all it does is discourage developers from releasing things open source... Great! Developers who don’t want others to use their software under an open license shouldn’t be releasing it under an open license in the first place! You have all the control as a creator, don’t give it away and then complain that you gave it away like it’s someone else’s fault for using the license you gave them.
      - Luc 8y ago
        Jeez,we're going to berate people who get ripped off because they're 19 year old art students that didn't consult a lawyer before releasing their art project?
        StudentStuff 8y ago
        OP did berate a 19 year old for not grasping the consequences of his actions. IMO this kid's actions are to be expected, the kid is 19 and does not have a critical eye for licensing. I doubt he would have needed a lawyer to choose a more appropriate license. This is the same trap I see 40-somethings falling into time after time, acting like AGPLv3 is evil while complaining how their (non-copyleft, open source) projects are widely used, extended and not contributed back to by those that use them. If your building a totally new platform in an area with no existing tools, strong copyleft is not a bad choice.
      - yesenadam 8y ago
        Is it really that hard for you to understand what the GP was saying? A jerk is somehow who, while not breaking the law, acts like..a jerk. They seem to think being able to get away with something somehow makes it OK. (e.g. bullies, trolls etc) Society relies on most people not acting like jerks most of the time. You seem to be saying, if someone follows the letter of the law, they possibly can't be a jerk. I guess you have no use for the word, as I don't know who it could then possibly apply to. I hear an increasing amount of talk as if ethics is or can be entirely contained within law, as if behaving legally is all that can or should be asked of us as humans. I don't know if it's the pervasive influence of lawyers and corporate 'culture' or what. In that "greed is good" etc mindset, 'being a jerk' isn't a bad thing, it's merely not being a sap, using your freedoms, using accepted business principles etc. Your whole comment smells of that total absence of ethics, beyond obeying the law, i.e. no ethics. Sorry if I misunderstood. Maybe your "What on earth are you on about!?" etc was exaggerated for rhetorical effect, and not what it seemed - having no clue why someone might call it 'a jerk move', or feel it was unfair/rude/graceless/exploitative etc.
        arkades 8y ago
    - majormajor 8y ago
      > All it does is discourage developers from releasing things open source, which is very bad in the long run. Is it, though? In terms of keeping a health job market, I'm somewhat skeptical that offering things license to allow even commercial usages for free is necessarily a long-term good for me.
    - arkades 8y ago
      But the creator has the freedom to choose any license they like, any at all. They chose a very permissive one. Why is it being a jerk to engage in a behavior that someone freely gave their blessing to?
  - reitzensteinm 8y ago
    Next time you leave your headlights on and someone helps you jump start, remember that you're not legally obligated to thank him or her. Most people don't seem to understand this.
    - crooked-v 8y ago
      An appropriate analogy in this case would be someone putting up a sign that explicitly says that nobody has to thank them, then getting mad that nobody thanked them.
      - emerongi 8y ago
        This dude set up a "this is for free" sign and then some other dudes just swooped in saying "we'll take all of this" and then just replaced the sign with "$500k". The problem with this is that it disincentivizes the sharing mentality. Nobody wants to be the guy who gets taken advantage of, yet everyone benefits from free sharing of knowledge. And then once in a while you have dudes who swoop in and make everyone look stupid and make them re-think whether they should ever share their findings with others again. Obvious could make this right if they wanted to. Yet they are standing their ground on Twitter, it seems.
        mclehman 8y ago
        >This dude set up a "this is for free" sign and then some other dudes just swooped in saying "we'll take all of this" and then just replaced the sign with "$500k". This loses the important nuance that them swooping in and slapping a price tag on their own use of the implementation doesn't deprive anyone of access to the original on the same terms they were able to access it. No one has lost anything in this scenario. >The problem with this is that it disincentivizes the sharing mentality. Personally, I feel arguing over how people make use of freely shared knowledge does more harm a culture of sharing than usage of said knowledge, even when that usage pushes right up to the bounds of what is allowed under whichever license.
        8y ago
rhacker 8y ago
All I can say is "follow the money"... I can see someone paying for the AI program, but not for one of its digital outputs. I'm guessing this is an internal purchase for the news story.
- jermaustin1 8y ago
  I doubt this. It is more likely just a very wealthy person wanting to buy the first artwork completely done by an AI that hit a major auction house. That is news, the fact that it is in the news automatically adds to the cache around the piece. That makes for a solid art investment.
  - drb91 8y ago
    The work could have been literally anything so long as it was generated by a computer. The art here is convincing people the algorithm = AI.
40acres 8y ago
I'd buy art (and listen to music) generated by an AI, but I'll admit that I think some creative products lose a bit of their essence when not created by humans. We know math and science can be found within art: measures and half measures in music, the golden ratio in painting, etc. Optimizing for these mathematical properties seems a bit like cheating for lack of a better word. There are many musicians and artists without classical training that encounter these attributes on their own, and manipulate them in different ways. I think part of the reason why the arts are such a great platform for human creativity is because of this.
- everdev 8y ago
  >I think some creative products lose a bit of their essence when not created by humans Does they though? I bet in 10 years, if you walked into an art gallery, you'd still be drawn to certain pieces and not others regardless of wether they were created by human or AI. As AI improves it will get ever closer to that "hand-made" look to the point we probably won't be able to tell, especially with something with as much intrinsic variety as creativity. In fact, if AI is trying to copy a "human style", we might be able to define how narrow or broad our range of creativity really is.
  - 40acres 8y ago
    I think there are (at least) two parts to evaluating a creative product. The aesthetics and the context around it. I think AI will do a wonderful job of generating aesthetically pleasing art, but could an AI generate something like Guernica? when you look at Guernica you can feel the pain and trauma behind it, when you learn that Picasso was compelled to create it after Guernica was firebombed it adds something special to the final product. At it's current state I have doubts about AI's ability to create new movements in art as well, a lot of the AI floating around there is very good at "coloring within the lines". If I watch a video of NFL highlights on YouTube I will be recommended more NFL highlights, where is the discovery? A fundamental challenge for AI art is can it create new genres. Could an AI create Jazz? How about Hip-Hop which has some Jazz elements. Could an AI create cubism? Guess we'll have to see.
everdev 8y ago
I could see someone paying for the novelty of one of the first well-known AI paintings, but I can imagine supply and demand economics will drive prices way down as more high quality AI art floods the market. Good time to get in though while supply is still low and demand is high.
- mattnewton 8y ago
  Is this even good quality? I imagine this is just the novelty.. and even that is quesionable to me. The real feat for me isn’t in using this open source model to generate this painting, it seems to be convincing anyone that this was worth $432k
Luc 8y ago
"The painting, called Portrait of Edmond Belamy, was created by a Paris-based art collective called Obvious." Hopefully the person who wrote the code, freely shared it and even helped them to get it running will see some of that ridiculous windfall: https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  It isn't required by the license, but it is required by the primate fairness sense. A donation to the open-source project would be appropriate. Alternatively, the Obvious collective will be now and forevermore tagged as non-contributing leeches. Which will likely not tarnish their enjoyment of their $144k each before auction fees and taxes, but might discourage future AI/ML developers from releasing under such a permissive license in the future.
  - therein 8y ago
    > Alternatively, the Obvious collective will be now and forevermore tagged as non-contributing leeches. Exactly. It doesn't sound like they are afraid of this but they really should be. Nobody will want to buy the next artwork of a collective with that reputation.
    - gowld 8y ago
      The people who pay fortunes for framed art don't know or care about open source licensing.
    - Springtime 8y ago
      I do wonder how many art collectors who would be interested in such pieces would know or care. To me the sale was due to the way it was promoted and sold rather than any merit of the piece itself. Outside of particular tech story comment sections and who've seen the Twitter threads I'm not sure it's going to be some big controversy.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
OisinMoran 8y ago
Twitter thread from the author of the original algorithm: https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 (worth reading the whole thread, the art collective reply) GitHub link: https://github.com/robbiebarrat/art-dcgan https://github.com/robbiebarrat/art-dcgan The README was last edited 6 months ago and contains the bolded text: "When using any outputs of the models, credit me. Don't sell the outputs of the pre-trained models, modified or not. If you have any questions email me before doing anything."
- phaedrus 8y ago
  Reminds me of Infiniminer vs Minecraft, or GNU vs Linux. Or, especially, the Box2D creator asking Rovio to credit Box2D in Angry Birds. (Did they ever do so?) It sounds like Obvious at least attempted to give credit, but were ignored by the media. https://www.geek.com/games/box2d-creator-asks-rovio-for-angry-birds-credit-at-gdc-1321779/ https://www.geek.com/games/box2d-creator-asks-rovio-for-angr...
- crooked-v 8y ago
  Licenses aren't retroactive. If you don't want people making money off your stuff (yes, even with direct copy-and-pastes), use CC-BY-NC or similar, not the BSD License.
- blotter_paper 8y ago
  I feel like this screencap posted by Obvious was the most illuminating part of that twitstorm: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqVdWJSW4AAOtXD?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqVdWJSW4AAOtXD?format=jpg
  - spongepoc 8y ago
    If Obvious hadn't been successful with their goals, Robbie would not (and did not) care a bit that his work was being used. It only became contentious when they were able to raise a lot of money. It's funny.
    - 8y ago
mysterEFrank 8y ago
LOL at the signature on the painting
thescriptkiddie 8y ago
Is it an actual painting or a print?
- Qwertystop 8y ago
  It looks like paint-on-canvas to me, but without a zoomed-in shot (perhaps from an angle other than dead-on) it's hard to tell whether it actually is paint-on-canvas or just a printed image that looks like one. So... dunno.
- kleopullin 8y ago
  It's printed on canvas, the AI did not paint it literally, it is digital art; it's not an actual painting. If you wanted, you could print your own!
_pastel 8y ago
This article has by far my favorite explanation of GANs for image generation: To generate the image, the algorithm compared its own work to those in the data set until it could not tell them apart. Amazingly succinct, lay-person friendly, and still pretty accurate.
habitue 8y ago
The next logical thing is to sell a computer and a large 4K monitor that creates a new painting for you every day
- gnulinux 8y ago
  And you can do that for $2000, which is $430000 cheaper than that one painting.
cycrutchfield 8y ago
The results are so amateurish though. What’s with those nasty deconvolution artifacts?
- isoprophlex 8y ago
  My thoughts exactly, those artifacts!! Ugh.
- mattnewton 8y ago
  How will you know a computer did it and not an amateur unless it looks crappy in a very specific way?
- dkural 8y ago
  It clearly marks it as early, and as the work of a computer in the public's mind. We'll fondly think of these nasty deconvolution artifacts as retro in the not-too-distant future.
samfriedman 8y ago
Related: I know the authors used a DCGAN implementation (a pre-trained model, it looks like), but is it known what their approach for up-scaling the generated images is? In art generation I've seen GAN output of 128x128, e.g. that is then upscaled with a super-resolution network. Is something similar being done for the "final painting", or is the GAN somehow efficient enough to do large-format output in a decent training time?
- spython 8y ago
  You can use neural style transfer algorithms to upscale to a decent resolution, if you use style image similar to the DCGAN generated output.
- NegatioN 8y ago
  I don't know exactly what was used to upscale here, but Progressive Growing of GANs[0] was a breakthrough last year that proved at least 1024x1024 was viably producable. The short explanation is: Train and freeze the most basic layer of the model progressively to "let the network" understand higher resolution concepts one piece at the time, and avoid mode-collapse. The network architecture illustrating this a bit better is shown on page 3 of the paper [1] [0]: https://github.com/tkarras/progressive_growing_of_gans https://github.com/tkarras/progressive_growing_of_gans [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.10196.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.10196.pdf
  - madaxe_again 8y ago
    I think they’ve upscaled using Lanczos resampling and have then done wavelet deconvolution - the thing is furry with artefacts, and looks just like when I push an astronomical image too far.
king_magic 8y ago
Color me extremely unimpressed. I just can't believe someone would pay that much for something... so visually mediocre. When you look at how GANs work, they are incredible for what they are (especially StackGAN / GANs conditioned on some input)... but I just don't think there's any real creativity - or for that matter, intelligence - in GANs yet.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  I have the same impression. It reminds me of the infamous “Ecce Homo” from Boria.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    Other style transfer AIs have produced much more spectacular results without blurring the image.
- jazzyjackson 8y ago
  Maybe that's what attracted the buyer, that this is an early work of AI art.
  - drb91 8y ago
    “AI” meaning what exactly? The real work of art here is convincing the buyer this algorithm is meaningful.
- Raphmedia 8y ago
  It's one of the first work of art by an AI. Think of how much this fact alone will increase the price of the painting in 200 years.
  - king_magic 8y ago
    Ehhhh, but is it really a "work of art"? That's what I take issue with.
WAthrowaway 8y ago
Proof that money cannot buy taste
whywhywhywhy 8y ago
As someone who works in creative coding as an artist and has worked in advertising (where this happens a lot) I feel deeply sorry that someone made so much from this artists work they happily put out into the world, I’ve seen this happen time and time again. This is a really horrible life lesson that licenses matter and if you create something it’s important to think through yourself how to make money off it and do it yourself (and think hard if you care about that because caring retroactively is too late), before you set it free because if you don’t do it then someone else will and honestly you only have yourself to blame because the reality is you didn’t want to put the small bit of extra effort required to make money off the thing
- mojomark 8y ago
  >you didn’t want to put the small bit of extra effort required to make money off the thing I agree with you, except for the words "small bit". As an inventor, with a few issued and pending patents under my belt, I can assure you that bringing an invention (software or hardware) to market is no small feat. For me, concieving of crafty algorithms or a new device is the easy part. Even writing a patent, whild time consuming, is straight forward. However, getting people to buy said inventions and establishing an efficient "supply chain", for me, is the excrutiatingly hard part. For some, this part comes naturally, and it's the act of invention that is tough. For a lucky select few, they are talented at both. Still, the requisite investment of time and money is generally not small.
erwan 8y ago
I have sympathy for the author's frustration but they open-sourced their work under a very permissive license. It sounds comical that suddenly something becomes valuable because you hang it in a gold frame, make minor modifications to it and ascribe it some symbolism. But that is exactly how contemporary artworks are done. If you go to exhibits and auctions, it is not uncommon to see highly valued work that requires little sophistication to produce. The days you would woo the art world by technical mastery alone are (mostly) over. This story fits in the greater trend and there might be a bit of a culture clash. I'm inclined to think that the general public underestimate contemporary art and the art world overestimate its superiority over the more conventional works. Whether it is for better or worse, I will leave you judge of that.
- creddit 8y ago
  > I'm inclined to think that the general public underestimate contemporary art and the art world overestimate its superiority over the more conventional works. I really like your framing of this and agree wholeheartedly. I think it really comes from contemporary art’s focus on abstraction and meaning within context. The combination of focus on abstraction and meaning while requiring the viewer to understand the context in which a work was made makes it very inaccessible to all but those who have the time and knowledge to develop that understanding from. This makes it very inaccessible to general audiences. Alternatively, so often the depth of the meaning/context and the effectiveness of the abstraction are quite underwhelming in reality but overly celebrated by the art world.
  - guelo 8y ago
    In that case accessibility would be enhanced by the artist writing down the meaning and context. But I take it that artists are loathe to do that because they fear that explaining it would make it lose it's mystique, kind of like how explaining a joke ruins it, so you basically end up with what amounts to elaborate inside jokes. OTOH, it probably helps drive up the price when the rich buyers feel like they're part of the secret in-group.
    - 8y ago
rcfox 8y ago
I wonder if the person who bought it will sue for damages when the AI program is inevitably used to spit out millions of similar portraits on demand.
- kleopullin 8y ago
  Why would or could they? It's a digital print created by a computer algorithm. Computer algorithms can't own copyrights, so you can print your own.
- deleted 8y ago
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dang 8y ago
The main article on this is https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/23/18013190/ai-art-portrait-auction-christies-belamy-obvious-robbie-barrat-gans https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/23/18013190/ai-art-portrait..., which predates the auction. We changed the above url from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45980863 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45980863 to one that has a bit more info.
deleted 8y ago
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muktaakash 8y ago
Blu bla blah blan blac blanc I!
DrNuke 8y ago
That’s why hand-made artifacts will soon be back in force through a new generation of more savvy art dealers, this hopefully being good for a startup or good enough for lifestyle businesses in the coming decade.
crucialfelix 8y ago
The work of Art is the act of putting it up for auction on Christie's. That's what makes it a conceptual piece that is being discussed. People often mistake art for a form of labor production. They expect that labor has to have been performed to create value. But that all changed in the early 20th century. I really feel bad for Dr. Beef, this must really hurt. But according to the twitter thread ( https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 ) they didn't use the pre-trained models. In any case pre-trained models are labor, not end product. They simply trained them from scratch. Possibly on the same input set. Even if his license was more strict, they still could have just rewritten the same code and it would have escaped the licensing. Should the original GAN paper ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661 https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661 ? ) be given artistic credit here ? What is authorship in this context ? There is a whole chain of people furthering things and doing labor and making decisions. Yet nobody has even mentioned the original artists whose works were used to train the model. Would it be different if they were living artists ? In what way is a GAN essentially different than photoshop copy and paste of elements ?
- delinka 8y ago
  "...they still could have just rewritten the same code and it would have escaped the licensing." I may be misinterpreting your intent, but this seems disingenuous to me. I can't go look at the Linux kernel, then 'rewrite' [the same code] with my fingers and keyboard to escape copyright ownership of Linux kernel contributors. I can rewrite code that implements a described process. Or code that implements a described interface. If this was your intent, I'll take the blame for misunderstanding. But I caution the use of phrases like "the same code" when you actually mean new code that implements the same process.
  - crucialfelix 8y ago
    I mean new code that implements the same process. But in reality I mean people who take code and rewrite it just enough to obscure where it came from. It is totally disingenuous and immoral and all too common.
  - 8y ago
pgnas 8y ago
Drill and uninspiring
sammyo 8y ago
An art photographer had a show where he presented his original photos of... other famous photographs. Lovely controversy about what is an original photo. It's just what a segment of the art world does - mess with the definition of the art world. Look at Banksy's million dollar shredder.
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rargulati 8y ago
> winning bidder wished to be kept anonymous I wonder if this is a marketing stunt, or an effort to increase the visibility and legitimacy of AI generated art.
- kleopullin 8y ago
  Purchasers of controversial artwork often chose to remain anonymous at least initially. There's nothing unusual about this, and discussing it with friends we all assumed it would sell 1) for much more and 2) to an anonymous buyer. Nothing unusual about it.
deleted 8y ago
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gesman 8y ago
It has nothing to do with the object of sale but mostly with the fact that it's Christie's effort. Try to sell identical thing on eBay for $10 and watch the world making fun of you at zero bids.
- lultimouomo 8y ago
  This. I don't have much sympathy for the sellers profiting off open source code without apparently any intention of contributing back even a little, but it's clear that the 400k valuation is not a direct outcome of the code quality - after all you can make litteraly millions of painting from the same "author" for bucks each. The 400k come from the marketing skills of the sellers (or, if you're less generous, from the fact that they're probably very well connected to the right people in the art market).
sfled 8y ago
Needs more shredder.
stevep98 8y ago
The artwork should have been generated during the auction itself, with individual bids being seeds into the generative process. The bidders would contribute to the next generation. You wouldn't know what the final product would be. But, you'd own each of the steps in the process, not just the final image. You heard it here first!
Pristina 8y ago
Imagine yourself writing a javascript library to do some mundane thing then releasing it as GPL and then somebody made a slightly modified copy of it and licenses it to google for 5M a year.
- tedeh 8y ago
  The generally held opinion on this is that that would never work, because Google has no reason to pay 5M a year to something that is available to anyone for free. The keyword is "slightly modified" here which implies that the modification is trivial. If the modifications are not trivial, then all bets are off of course.
ForrestN 8y ago
An interesting phenomenon is happening vis a vis the art market. Very rich tech buyers are catapulting the value of artists (and, I guess, AI collectives) that aren't really participating much in the "contemporary art" discourse. I look at current art shows all day every day from all over the world and have never heard anything about these people. It's the same with the various "crypto artists." For $400k you could buy a dozen works by some really influential artists. But there's a big pool of money willing to buy work made by some 25 year olds that is totally disconnected from any broader cultural apparatus related to art. I'm fascinated, and wonder how the art world will respond. Clearly there is money to be made.
tlrobinson 8y ago
I'd like to see the first AI self-portrait.
drb91 8y ago
Suckers!
kjullien 8y ago
"Here's the code to the network they copied. If any of you guys want to make a quick $10,000 from my work, now is the perfect time." Oh man he's going to be more than upset about the price this got sold at :S
mcemilg 8y ago
This is a sad story. But Everybody needs to get some lesson from this case if they publish their work as open. The open source licenses needs to update for machine learning models.
hamilyon2 8y ago
I almost see artifacts on painting, similar to simple NN algorithms like https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs/demo/image_regression.html https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs/demo/image... produce.

187 points by monkeydust 8y ago

This could be something great if the author of the original algorithm and datasets was given proper credits. https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055360024548012033 https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055360024548012033

timClicks 8y ago
I think that people don't seem to understand that most open source licences don't require attribution. If you have released your code according to a licence, what right do you have to complain that people are using that code in accordance with that licence? In this case though, it looks like Obvious did set out to attribute the original GAN author and Christie's have omitted that.
- minimaxir 8y ago
  > what right do you have to complain that people are using that code in accordance with that licence? It’s not legally required to credit the author of the original code, but it’s a jerk move not to do so, especially if the work is primarily not your own. All it does is discourage developers from releasing things open source, which is very bad in the long run.
  - talltimtom 8y ago
    > but it’s a jerk move... What on earth are you on about!? The author has every possible opportunity to set out whatever he wants in the license. If he wants anyone who uses it to name their firstborn after him he can put that in there. If he doesn’t then there is absolutely no issue or nothing jerk-like of anyone who follows to the letter he license the author decided to use. It’s up to the author to specify what he wants, and as long as users follow the license that’s their right. If you want a license that only allows non commercial usage to be unattributed but requires attribution for commercial usage... then use such a license. Don’t just put it up under a permissive license and rely on calling people jerks when they literally do what you specified and gave them license to do. > all it does is discourage developers from releasing things open source... Great! Developers who don’t want others to use their software under an open license shouldn’t be releasing it under an open license in the first place! You have all the control as a creator, don’t give it away and then complain that you gave it away like it’s someone else’s fault for using the license you gave them.
    - Luc 8y ago
      Jeez,we're going to berate people who get ripped off because they're 19 year old art students that didn't consult a lawyer before releasing their art project?
      - StudentStuff 8y ago
        OP did berate a 19 year old for not grasping the consequences of his actions. IMO this kid's actions are to be expected, the kid is 19 and does not have a critical eye for licensing. I doubt he would have needed a lawyer to choose a more appropriate license. This is the same trap I see 40-somethings falling into time after time, acting like AGPLv3 is evil while complaining how their (non-copyleft, open source) projects are widely used, extended and not contributed back to by those that use them. If your building a totally new platform in an area with no existing tools, strong copyleft is not a bad choice.
    - yesenadam 8y ago
      Is it really that hard for you to understand what the GP was saying? A jerk is somehow who, while not breaking the law, acts like..a jerk. They seem to think being able to get away with something somehow makes it OK. (e.g. bullies, trolls etc) Society relies on most people not acting like jerks most of the time. You seem to be saying, if someone follows the letter of the law, they possibly can't be a jerk. I guess you have no use for the word, as I don't know who it could then possibly apply to. I hear an increasing amount of talk as if ethics is or can be entirely contained within law, as if behaving legally is all that can or should be asked of us as humans. I don't know if it's the pervasive influence of lawyers and corporate 'culture' or what. In that "greed is good" etc mindset, 'being a jerk' isn't a bad thing, it's merely not being a sap, using your freedoms, using accepted business principles etc. Your whole comment smells of that total absence of ethics, beyond obeying the law, i.e. no ethics. Sorry if I misunderstood. Maybe your "What on earth are you on about!?" etc was exaggerated for rhetorical effect, and not what it seemed - having no clue why someone might call it 'a jerk move', or feel it was unfair/rude/graceless/exploitative etc.
      - arkades 8y ago
  - majormajor 8y ago
    > All it does is discourage developers from releasing things open source, which is very bad in the long run. Is it, though? In terms of keeping a health job market, I'm somewhat skeptical that offering things license to allow even commercial usages for free is necessarily a long-term good for me.
  - arkades 8y ago
    But the creator has the freedom to choose any license they like, any at all. They chose a very permissive one. Why is it being a jerk to engage in a behavior that someone freely gave their blessing to?
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  Next time you leave your headlights on and someone helps you jump start, remember that you're not legally obligated to thank him or her. Most people don't seem to understand this.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    An appropriate analogy in this case would be someone putting up a sign that explicitly says that nobody has to thank them, then getting mad that nobody thanked them.
    - emerongi 8y ago
      This dude set up a "this is for free" sign and then some other dudes just swooped in saying "we'll take all of this" and then just replaced the sign with "$500k". The problem with this is that it disincentivizes the sharing mentality. Nobody wants to be the guy who gets taken advantage of, yet everyone benefits from free sharing of knowledge. And then once in a while you have dudes who swoop in and make everyone look stupid and make them re-think whether they should ever share their findings with others again. Obvious could make this right if they wanted to. Yet they are standing their ground on Twitter, it seems.
      - mclehman 8y ago
        >This dude set up a "this is for free" sign and then some other dudes just swooped in saying "we'll take all of this" and then just replaced the sign with "$500k". This loses the important nuance that them swooping in and slapping a price tag on their own use of the implementation doesn't deprive anyone of access to the original on the same terms they were able to access it. No one has lost anything in this scenario. >The problem with this is that it disincentivizes the sharing mentality. Personally, I feel arguing over how people make use of freely shared knowledge does more harm a culture of sharing than usage of said knowledge, even when that usage pushes right up to the bounds of what is allowed under whichever license.
        8y ago

rhacker 8y ago

All I can say is "follow the money"... I can see someone paying for the AI program, but not for one of its digital outputs. I'm guessing this is an internal purchase for the news story.

jermaustin1 8y ago
I doubt this. It is more likely just a very wealthy person wanting to buy the first artwork completely done by an AI that hit a major auction house. That is news, the fact that it is in the news automatically adds to the cache around the piece. That makes for a solid art investment.
- drb91 8y ago
  The work could have been literally anything so long as it was generated by a computer. The art here is convincing people the algorithm = AI.

40acres 8y ago

I'd buy art (and listen to music) generated by an AI, but I'll admit that I think some creative products lose a bit of their essence when not created by humans. We know math and science can be found within art: measures and half measures in music, the golden ratio in painting, etc. Optimizing for these mathematical properties seems a bit like cheating for lack of a better word. There are many musicians and artists without classical training that encounter these attributes on their own, and manipulate them in different ways. I think part of the reason why the arts are such a great platform for human creativity is because of this.

everdev 8y ago
>I think some creative products lose a bit of their essence when not created by humans Does they though? I bet in 10 years, if you walked into an art gallery, you'd still be drawn to certain pieces and not others regardless of wether they were created by human or AI. As AI improves it will get ever closer to that "hand-made" look to the point we probably won't be able to tell, especially with something with as much intrinsic variety as creativity. In fact, if AI is trying to copy a "human style", we might be able to define how narrow or broad our range of creativity really is.
- 40acres 8y ago
  I think there are (at least) two parts to evaluating a creative product. The aesthetics and the context around it. I think AI will do a wonderful job of generating aesthetically pleasing art, but could an AI generate something like Guernica? when you look at Guernica you can feel the pain and trauma behind it, when you learn that Picasso was compelled to create it after Guernica was firebombed it adds something special to the final product. At it's current state I have doubts about AI's ability to create new movements in art as well, a lot of the AI floating around there is very good at "coloring within the lines". If I watch a video of NFL highlights on YouTube I will be recommended more NFL highlights, where is the discovery? A fundamental challenge for AI art is can it create new genres. Could an AI create Jazz? How about Hip-Hop which has some Jazz elements. Could an AI create cubism? Guess we'll have to see.

everdev 8y ago

I could see someone paying for the novelty of one of the first well-known AI paintings, but I can imagine supply and demand economics will drive prices way down as more high quality AI art floods the market. Good time to get in though while supply is still low and demand is high.

mattnewton 8y ago
Is this even good quality? I imagine this is just the novelty.. and even that is quesionable to me. The real feat for me isn’t in using this open source model to generate this painting, it seems to be convincing anyone that this was worth $432k

Luc 8y ago

"The painting, called Portrait of Edmond Belamy, was created by a Paris-based art collective called Obvious." Hopefully the person who wrote the code, freely shared it and even helped them to get it running will see some of that ridiculous windfall: https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073

logfromblammo 8y ago
It isn't required by the license, but it is required by the primate fairness sense. A donation to the open-source project would be appropriate. Alternatively, the Obvious collective will be now and forevermore tagged as non-contributing leeches. Which will likely not tarnish their enjoyment of their $144k each before auction fees and taxes, but might discourage future AI/ML developers from releasing under such a permissive license in the future.
- therein 8y ago
  > Alternatively, the Obvious collective will be now and forevermore tagged as non-contributing leeches. Exactly. It doesn't sound like they are afraid of this but they really should be. Nobody will want to buy the next artwork of a collective with that reputation.
  - gowld 8y ago
    The people who pay fortunes for framed art don't know or care about open source licensing.
  - Springtime 8y ago
    I do wonder how many art collectors who would be interested in such pieces would know or care. To me the sale was due to the way it was promoted and sold rather than any merit of the piece itself. Outside of particular tech story comment sections and who've seen the Twitter threads I'm not sure it's going to be some big controversy.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago

OisinMoran 8y ago

Twitter thread from the author of the original algorithm: https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 (worth reading the whole thread, the art collective reply) GitHub link: https://github.com/robbiebarrat/art-dcgan https://github.com/robbiebarrat/art-dcgan The README was last edited 6 months ago and contains the bolded text: "When using any outputs of the models, credit me. Don't sell the outputs of the pre-trained models, modified or not. If you have any questions email me before doing anything."

phaedrus 8y ago
Reminds me of Infiniminer vs Minecraft, or GNU vs Linux. Or, especially, the Box2D creator asking Rovio to credit Box2D in Angry Birds. (Did they ever do so?) It sounds like Obvious at least attempted to give credit, but were ignored by the media. https://www.geek.com/games/box2d-creator-asks-rovio-for-angry-birds-credit-at-gdc-1321779/ https://www.geek.com/games/box2d-creator-asks-rovio-for-angr...
crooked-v 8y ago
Licenses aren't retroactive. If you don't want people making money off your stuff (yes, even with direct copy-and-pastes), use CC-BY-NC or similar, not the BSD License.
blotter_paper 8y ago
I feel like this screencap posted by Obvious was the most illuminating part of that twitstorm: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqVdWJSW4AAOtXD?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqVdWJSW4AAOtXD?format=jpg
- spongepoc 8y ago
  If Obvious hadn't been successful with their goals, Robbie would not (and did not) care a bit that his work was being used. It only became contentious when they were able to raise a lot of money. It's funny.
  - 8y ago

mysterEFrank 8y ago

LOL at the signature on the painting

thescriptkiddie 8y ago

Is it an actual painting or a print?

Qwertystop 8y ago
It looks like paint-on-canvas to me, but without a zoomed-in shot (perhaps from an angle other than dead-on) it's hard to tell whether it actually is paint-on-canvas or just a printed image that looks like one. So... dunno.
kleopullin 8y ago
It's printed on canvas, the AI did not paint it literally, it is digital art; it's not an actual painting. If you wanted, you could print your own!

_pastel 8y ago

This article has by far my favorite explanation of GANs for image generation: To generate the image, the algorithm compared its own work to those in the data set until it could not tell them apart. Amazingly succinct, lay-person friendly, and still pretty accurate.

habitue 8y ago

The next logical thing is to sell a computer and a large 4K monitor that creates a new painting for you every day

gnulinux 8y ago
And you can do that for $2000, which is $430000 cheaper than that one painting.

cycrutchfield 8y ago

The results are so amateurish though. What’s with those nasty deconvolution artifacts?

isoprophlex 8y ago
My thoughts exactly, those artifacts!! Ugh.
mattnewton 8y ago
How will you know a computer did it and not an amateur unless it looks crappy in a very specific way?
dkural 8y ago
It clearly marks it as early, and as the work of a computer in the public's mind. We'll fondly think of these nasty deconvolution artifacts as retro in the not-too-distant future.

samfriedman 8y ago

Related: I know the authors used a DCGAN implementation (a pre-trained model, it looks like), but is it known what their approach for up-scaling the generated images is? In art generation I've seen GAN output of 128x128, e.g. that is then upscaled with a super-resolution network. Is something similar being done for the "final painting", or is the GAN somehow efficient enough to do large-format output in a decent training time?

spython 8y ago
You can use neural style transfer algorithms to upscale to a decent resolution, if you use style image similar to the DCGAN generated output.
NegatioN 8y ago
I don't know exactly what was used to upscale here, but Progressive Growing of GANs[0] was a breakthrough last year that proved at least 1024x1024 was viably producable. The short explanation is: Train and freeze the most basic layer of the model progressively to "let the network" understand higher resolution concepts one piece at the time, and avoid mode-collapse. The network architecture illustrating this a bit better is shown on page 3 of the paper [1] [0]: https://github.com/tkarras/progressive_growing_of_gans https://github.com/tkarras/progressive_growing_of_gans [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.10196.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.10196.pdf
- madaxe_again 8y ago
  I think they’ve upscaled using Lanczos resampling and have then done wavelet deconvolution - the thing is furry with artefacts, and looks just like when I push an astronomical image too far.

king_magic 8y ago

Color me extremely unimpressed. I just can't believe someone would pay that much for something... so visually mediocre. When you look at how GANs work, they are incredible for what they are (especially StackGAN / GANs conditioned on some input)... but I just don't think there's any real creativity - or for that matter, intelligence - in GANs yet.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
I have the same impression. It reminds me of the infamous “Ecce Homo” from Boria.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Other style transfer AIs have produced much more spectacular results without blurring the image.
jazzyjackson 8y ago
Maybe that's what attracted the buyer, that this is an early work of AI art.
- drb91 8y ago
  “AI” meaning what exactly? The real work of art here is convincing the buyer this algorithm is meaningful.
Raphmedia 8y ago
It's one of the first work of art by an AI. Think of how much this fact alone will increase the price of the painting in 200 years.
- king_magic 8y ago
  Ehhhh, but is it really a "work of art"? That's what I take issue with.

WAthrowaway 8y ago

Proof that money cannot buy taste

whywhywhywhy 8y ago

As someone who works in creative coding as an artist and has worked in advertising (where this happens a lot) I feel deeply sorry that someone made so much from this artists work they happily put out into the world, I’ve seen this happen time and time again. This is a really horrible life lesson that licenses matter and if you create something it’s important to think through yourself how to make money off it and do it yourself (and think hard if you care about that because caring retroactively is too late), before you set it free because if you don’t do it then someone else will and honestly you only have yourself to blame because the reality is you didn’t want to put the small bit of extra effort required to make money off the thing

mojomark 8y ago
>you didn’t want to put the small bit of extra effort required to make money off the thing I agree with you, except for the words "small bit". As an inventor, with a few issued and pending patents under my belt, I can assure you that bringing an invention (software or hardware) to market is no small feat. For me, concieving of crafty algorithms or a new device is the easy part. Even writing a patent, whild time consuming, is straight forward. However, getting people to buy said inventions and establishing an efficient "supply chain", for me, is the excrutiatingly hard part. For some, this part comes naturally, and it's the act of invention that is tough. For a lucky select few, they are talented at both. Still, the requisite investment of time and money is generally not small.

erwan 8y ago

I have sympathy for the author's frustration but they open-sourced their work under a very permissive license. It sounds comical that suddenly something becomes valuable because you hang it in a gold frame, make minor modifications to it and ascribe it some symbolism. But that is exactly how contemporary artworks are done. If you go to exhibits and auctions, it is not uncommon to see highly valued work that requires little sophistication to produce. The days you would woo the art world by technical mastery alone are (mostly) over. This story fits in the greater trend and there might be a bit of a culture clash. I'm inclined to think that the general public underestimate contemporary art and the art world overestimate its superiority over the more conventional works. Whether it is for better or worse, I will leave you judge of that.

creddit 8y ago
> I'm inclined to think that the general public underestimate contemporary art and the art world overestimate its superiority over the more conventional works. I really like your framing of this and agree wholeheartedly. I think it really comes from contemporary art’s focus on abstraction and meaning within context. The combination of focus on abstraction and meaning while requiring the viewer to understand the context in which a work was made makes it very inaccessible to all but those who have the time and knowledge to develop that understanding from. This makes it very inaccessible to general audiences. Alternatively, so often the depth of the meaning/context and the effectiveness of the abstraction are quite underwhelming in reality but overly celebrated by the art world.
- guelo 8y ago
  In that case accessibility would be enhanced by the artist writing down the meaning and context. But I take it that artists are loathe to do that because they fear that explaining it would make it lose it's mystique, kind of like how explaining a joke ruins it, so you basically end up with what amounts to elaborate inside jokes. OTOH, it probably helps drive up the price when the rich buyers feel like they're part of the secret in-group.
  - 8y ago

rcfox 8y ago

I wonder if the person who bought it will sue for damages when the AI program is inevitably used to spit out millions of similar portraits on demand.

kleopullin 8y ago
Why would or could they? It's a digital print created by a computer algorithm. Computer algorithms can't own copyrights, so you can print your own.
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dang 8y ago

The main article on this is https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/23/18013190/ai-art-portrait-auction-christies-belamy-obvious-robbie-barrat-gans https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/23/18013190/ai-art-portrait..., which predates the auction. We changed the above url from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45980863 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45980863 to one that has a bit more info.

deleted 8y ago

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muktaakash 8y ago

Blu bla blah blan blac blanc I!

DrNuke 8y ago

That’s why hand-made artifacts will soon be back in force through a new generation of more savvy art dealers, this hopefully being good for a startup or good enough for lifestyle businesses in the coming decade.

crucialfelix 8y ago

The work of Art is the act of putting it up for auction on Christie's. That's what makes it a conceptual piece that is being discussed. People often mistake art for a form of labor production. They expect that labor has to have been performed to create value. But that all changed in the early 20th century. I really feel bad for Dr. Beef, this must really hurt. But according to the twitter thread ( https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 ) they didn't use the pre-trained models. In any case pre-trained models are labor, not end product. They simply trained them from scratch. Possibly on the same input set. Even if his license was more strict, they still could have just rewritten the same code and it would have escaped the licensing. Should the original GAN paper ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661 https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661 ? ) be given artistic credit here ? What is authorship in this context ? There is a whole chain of people furthering things and doing labor and making decisions. Yet nobody has even mentioned the original artists whose works were used to train the model. Would it be different if they were living artists ? In what way is a GAN essentially different than photoshop copy and paste of elements ?

delinka 8y ago
"...they still could have just rewritten the same code and it would have escaped the licensing." I may be misinterpreting your intent, but this seems disingenuous to me. I can't go look at the Linux kernel, then 'rewrite' [the same code] with my fingers and keyboard to escape copyright ownership of Linux kernel contributors. I can rewrite code that implements a described process. Or code that implements a described interface. If this was your intent, I'll take the blame for misunderstanding. But I caution the use of phrases like "the same code" when you actually mean new code that implements the same process.
- crucialfelix 8y ago
  I mean new code that implements the same process. But in reality I mean people who take code and rewrite it just enough to obscure where it came from. It is totally disingenuous and immoral and all too common.
- 8y ago

pgnas 8y ago

Drill and uninspiring

sammyo 8y ago

An art photographer had a show where he presented his original photos of... other famous photographs. Lovely controversy about what is an original photo. It's just what a segment of the art world does - mess with the definition of the art world. Look at Banksy's million dollar shredder.

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rargulati 8y ago

> winning bidder wished to be kept anonymous I wonder if this is a marketing stunt, or an effort to increase the visibility and legitimacy of AI generated art.

kleopullin 8y ago
Purchasers of controversial artwork often chose to remain anonymous at least initially. There's nothing unusual about this, and discussing it with friends we all assumed it would sell 1) for much more and 2) to an anonymous buyer. Nothing unusual about it.

deleted 8y ago

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gesman 8y ago

It has nothing to do with the object of sale but mostly with the fact that it's Christie's effort. Try to sell identical thing on eBay for $10 and watch the world making fun of you at zero bids.

lultimouomo 8y ago
This. I don't have much sympathy for the sellers profiting off open source code without apparently any intention of contributing back even a little, but it's clear that the 400k valuation is not a direct outcome of the code quality - after all you can make litteraly millions of painting from the same "author" for bucks each. The 400k come from the marketing skills of the sellers (or, if you're less generous, from the fact that they're probably very well connected to the right people in the art market).

sfled 8y ago

Needs more shredder.

stevep98 8y ago

The artwork should have been generated during the auction itself, with individual bids being seeds into the generative process. The bidders would contribute to the next generation. You wouldn't know what the final product would be. But, you'd own each of the steps in the process, not just the final image. You heard it here first!

Pristina 8y ago

Imagine yourself writing a javascript library to do some mundane thing then releasing it as GPL and then somebody made a slightly modified copy of it and licenses it to google for 5M a year.

tedeh 8y ago
The generally held opinion on this is that that would never work, because Google has no reason to pay 5M a year to something that is available to anyone for free. The keyword is "slightly modified" here which implies that the modification is trivial. If the modifications are not trivial, then all bets are off of course.

ForrestN 8y ago

An interesting phenomenon is happening vis a vis the art market. Very rich tech buyers are catapulting the value of artists (and, I guess, AI collectives) that aren't really participating much in the "contemporary art" discourse. I look at current art shows all day every day from all over the world and have never heard anything about these people. It's the same with the various "crypto artists." For $400k you could buy a dozen works by some really influential artists. But there's a big pool of money willing to buy work made by some 25 year olds that is totally disconnected from any broader cultural apparatus related to art. I'm fascinated, and wonder how the art world will respond. Clearly there is money to be made.

tlrobinson 8y ago

I'd like to see the first AI self-portrait.

drb91 8y ago

Suckers!

kjullien 8y ago

"Here's the code to the network they copied. If any of you guys want to make a quick $10,000 from my work, now is the perfect time." Oh man he's going to be more than upset about the price this got sold at :S

mcemilg 8y ago

This is a sad story. But Everybody needs to get some lesson from this case if they publish their work as open. The open source licenses needs to update for machine learning models.

hamilyon2 8y ago

I almost see artifacts on painting, similar to simple NN algorithms like https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs/demo/image_regression.html https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs/demo/image... produce.