Christie's becomes the site of a battle over AI art

Is it innovation or mass theft at the auction house?

Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations - ISS Dreams – A sold for $277,200

In every first-year art history course, there’s a moment—somewhere around the post-industrial age—when the professor drops the question: What is art?

This is when the slide of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain gets presented to the fresh-faced room. If you’ve never seen it before, a urinal elevated to high art is always guaranteed to spark a heated debate over what does and doesn’t belong within gallery walls.

The discussion is usually followed by a reading list that includes Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and an essay assignment on the meaning of originality in an era where anything can be copied.

An apt thesis for such an assignment: When technology changes, so does the definition of art.

This debate has been resurrected once again with Augmented Intelligence, a new AI art auction at Christie’s. Almost immediately after it was announced, over 4,000 artists signed an open letter demanding it be shut down, calling it “mass theft.” They argue that since AI models are trained on copyrighted images without artists’ consent, the entire premise of the auction is exploitative rather than innovative.

Christie’s defended the sale. They claim these particular artists trained their AI tools on their own work, making it an extension of their creative process rather than a rip-off. And it paid off. The auction closed with total sales reaching $728,784 USD, surpassing its original estimate of $600,000. Notably, 37% of bidders were new to Christie’s, and half were Millennials and Gen Z.

The highest grossing sale was Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations—ISS Dreams—A, which sold for nearly 40% more than its high estimate of $200,000, as both an NFT and a physical object. (Earlier this year, THE GRAIN discussed a feature exhibition by Anadol at the World Economic Forum in Davos.)

In response to the controversy, Anadol quipped on social media:

This is so funny :) majority of the artists in the project specifically pushing and using their own datasets + their own models! This is the basic problem of entire art ecosystem, results of lazy critic practices and doomsday hysteria driven dark minds. BUT — future is bright ;)

Christie’s vice president and director of digital art sales, Nicole Sales Giles, also weighed in on AI’s legitimacy as an artistic tool:

Augmented Intelligence’s major themes is that AI is not a replacement for human creativity.
You can see a lot of human agency in all of these works. In every single work, you’re seeing a collaboration between an AI model, a robot, or however the artist has chosen to incorporate AI. It is showing how AI is enhancing creativity and not becoming a substitute for it.

The overall results of the auction were considered mixed, as 14 of the 34 lots put on the block either received no qualifying bids, or sold for less than the estimated minimum from Christie’s.

My grain of thought

Art has always been shaped by the tools of its time. The camera didn’t kill painting. The printing press didn’t destroy literature. But every technological shift forces the art world to renegotiate what it values—and who gets to profit.

The backlash to Christie’s isn’t just about the ethics of training models on copyrighted work. It’s about control. Who owns creativity when machines can remix artistic styles at scale? The artists in Augmented Intelligence argue that AI can be a tool for human expression rather than a threat to it. But that argument is easier to make when you’re the one selling at Christie’s, not the one watching your aesthetic being scraped, synthesized and monetized by someone else.

As always, the market moves faster than the law. The real question isn’t whether AI art belongs in galleries—it already does. The question is whether the systems that govern creative work are equipped to handle a world where the definition of “original” is murkier than ever.