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Artwork created by AI sold for $435,000. Algorithm engineer not credited.

16 points by warent 8y ago

jawnTravolta 8y ago
When an artist paints a portrait on canvas, the people who made the paint, brushes, and canvas aren't credited. While the algorithm and its creator should be mentioned, I don't see them as a contributor to the work. It's just another tool for creating the artwork.
- ssfrr 8y ago
  That's a pretty poor example. Not all tools are equal, and one of the important ways to describe a tool is by what degrees of freedom it affords the user, and what aesthetic decisions are baked into it. A paintbrush has a lot of degrees of freedom and makes few assumptions. Even for tools that do a lot for you, finding unexpected/unintended degrees of freedom or subverting those aesthetic decisions is one way that artists innovate. From the article it seems that most of the aesthetic decisions in the resulting work were baked into the tool, not made by the artist. That said, a huge part of an artist's work is contextualizing their work and building a story around it, so in some ways if these guys were able to successfully convince people that it was worth $435k then good on them. I just don't expect that to last. When video equipment was inaccessible to most, simple video art was innovative and new. Now that the tools are easy to get and use the work needs to be more sophisticated.
contravariant 8y ago
While I can agree that it would have been better for the creator of the algorithm to be credited given that his contributions were a big part of what made the artwork possible, I can't really come up with a convincing argument that he should have any legal rights over the artwork (including the right to be credited). I fear it would set a dangerous precedent if using particular software grants the creator of the software rights over the result. Of course you require some degree of artistic input for it to be able to count as a separate work, but in my opinion selecting a particular image out of a (nigh infinite) generated set of images should still count.
- yayana 8y ago
  I think the lack of credit is fraud towards the purchaser. Since this was a first, the noteriety of it should be good enough for it to be a good investment.. But did the buyer know they were buying the first drop of water at the beginning of the rain season? I think there would be an expectation on the brand of the producers serving as a reputation and limit on the supply of "real" works. But the engineer doing a project with IKEA would make "realer" works.

16 points by warent 8y ago

When an artist paints a portrait on canvas, the people who made the paint, brushes, and canvas aren't credited. While the algorithm and its creator should be mentioned, I don't see them as a contributor to the work. It's just another tool for creating the artwork.

ssfrr 8y ago
That's a pretty poor example. Not all tools are equal, and one of the important ways to describe a tool is by what degrees of freedom it affords the user, and what aesthetic decisions are baked into it. A paintbrush has a lot of degrees of freedom and makes few assumptions. Even for tools that do a lot for you, finding unexpected/unintended degrees of freedom or subverting those aesthetic decisions is one way that artists innovate. From the article it seems that most of the aesthetic decisions in the resulting work were baked into the tool, not made by the artist. That said, a huge part of an artist's work is contextualizing their work and building a story around it, so in some ways if these guys were able to successfully convince people that it was worth $435k then good on them. I just don't expect that to last. When video equipment was inaccessible to most, simple video art was innovative and new. Now that the tools are easy to get and use the work needs to be more sophisticated.

contravariant 8y ago

While I can agree that it would have been better for the creator of the algorithm to be credited given that his contributions were a big part of what made the artwork possible, I can't really come up with a convincing argument that he should have any legal rights over the artwork (including the right to be credited). I fear it would set a dangerous precedent if using particular software grants the creator of the software rights over the result. Of course you require some degree of artistic input for it to be able to count as a separate work, but in my opinion selecting a particular image out of a (nigh infinite) generated set of images should still count.

yayana 8y ago
I think the lack of credit is fraud towards the purchaser. Since this was a first, the noteriety of it should be good enough for it to be a good investment.. But did the buyer know they were buying the first drop of water at the beginning of the rain season? I think there would be an expectation on the brand of the producers serving as a reputation and limit on the supply of "real" works. But the engineer doing a project with IKEA would make "realer" works.