“Christie’s can hold themselves accountable to a higher standard and engage with these things in a way that is supportive of artists as a whole, and doesn’t package these exploitative models into their auction alongside people that are doing things ethically,” Southen said.

Southen, a Michigan-based film industry concept artist, said he and many of his peers have lost work and had their income “slashed in half” over the past two years due to AI.

Art isn’t the only industry bracing for change. According to a World Economic Forum report released last month, 41% of employers expect to downsize their workforce as AI begins to replicate roles. Sixty-nine percent said they plan to recruit talent skilled in AI tool design and enhancement.

But Christie’s sees AI as a natural progression in art history. Nicole Sales Giles, Christie’s director of digital art, said she welcomes debate around the auction as a sign that AI will transform art to the industry’s benefit.

“I’m not a copyright lawyer, so I can’t comment on the legality, but from a theft-influence angle, artists have been influenced by other artists for centuries,” Sales Giles said.

Many of the artists featured in the auction used their own data — including personal photography, curated collages and their own poetry — to train their AI models.

“The AI I’ve been using for almost 10 years was not trained on other artists’ work,” said digital artist Daniel Ambrosi, whose work is part of the auction. “It was not even created to make art in the first place.”

Ambrosi fed his photography of Central Park into Google’s DeepDream at two different scales. The AI recognizes the image and moves pixels around in hallucinogenic ways.

“It’s like I’m the leader of a jazz band,” he said. “I write original compositions, and I have this virtuoso saxophonist who knows where I’m going with the song, but is going to improvise, surprise and delight me.”