The slop: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/cpsprodpb/a50d/live/57dcda40-9d54-11ef-9850-61b70bbc107f.png.webp
spoiler
A painting by an AI robot of the eminent World War Two codebreaker Alan Turing has sold for $1,084,800 (£836,667) at auction.
Sotheby's said there were 27 bids for the digital art sale of "A.I. God", which had been originally estimated to sell for between $120,000 (£90,252) and $180,000 (£139,000).
Mathematician Turing was a pioneer of computer science and known as the father of artificial intelligence (AI).
The auction house said the historic sale "launches a new frontier in the global art market, establishing the auction benchmark for an artwork by a humanoid robot".
It added the work by Ai-Da Robot is "the first humanoid robot artist to have an artwork sold at auction."
The work is a large scale original portrait of Turing, who studied at King's College, Cambridge.
The scientist played a crucial role in the Allies' victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two by helping to crack codes and deciphering the infamous Enigma machine at Bletchley Park.
After the war he produced a detailed design for a digital computer in the modern sense.
Sotheby's said the online sale, which ended at 19:00 GMT on Thursday, was bought by an undisclosed buyer for a price "far outstripping the artwork’s estimate price".
The auction house said the sale price for the first artwork by a humanoid robot artist "marks a moment in the history of modern and contemporary art and reflects the growing intersection between A.I. technology and the global art market".
Ai-Da Robot, which uses an advanced AI language model to speak, said: "The key value of my work is its capacity to serve as a catalyst for dialogue about emerging technologies."
The work "invites viewers to reflect on the god-like nature of AI and computing while considering the ethical and societal implications of these advancements", the robot said.
"Alan Turing recognised this potential, and stares at us, as we race towards this future." Ai-Da Robot Studios Ai-Da Robot, an AI robot, standing in front of several works of art. She is having her photo taken by two people standing in front of her. You can see a camera and a light. A man is walking away from and another man is on a mezzanine floor. The floor is green.
Aidan Meller, director of the Ai-Da Robot Studios, said: "This auction is an important moment for the visual arts, where Ai-Da’s artwork brings focus on artworld and societal changes, as we grapple with the rising age of AI.
"The artwork 'AI God' raises questions about agency, as AI gains more power."
Me with my $300k monkey jpeg: look at the intrinsic value, creativity, and socioeconomic revolution this monkey jpeg has because I paid $300k for it. It's completely nonfungible because you can't right click it and save the image.
Me with my $1m recombination of all the Alan Turing pictures on google images with a prompt saying "make it dark and like Beksinski kind of": look at the intrinsic value, creativity, and socioeconomic revolution this Alan Turing jpeg has because I paid $1m for it. It's completely nonfungible because you can't prompt a free image generator using the same dataset with "oil painting, alan turing, make it dark and like Beksinski kind of".
:walter-benjamin-agony:
it's gonna go the way of the nft then?
I don't see how it ever be anything but an NFT. My tattoo artist charges $250 per hour. I could buy his tattoo gun for $500 and tattoo my entire body for the cost of the ink. It makes more sense to instead pay him $250 per hour because it would take me years of dedicated practice to have 1/10th of the artistic ability he has. That's the actual value of art, the craftsmanship which gives it individual creative spirit and the new ideas it creates. If I can reprint the same work in an instant, even better because my prompt will reflect my aesthetic values, there's no reason I wouldn't just do that instead of buying any AI-generated commodity. I even described this painting to a horny minotaur chatbot and it gave me the same kind of generic answer this chatbot did to describe its hallucination, so the entire idea of the work is just the weighted average of what 500 bazinga-brained reddit comments think AI will be.
so, just buy the painting robot instead?
No need to buy it if you can get competing models for free.
oh yeah, good point
It is just an NFT, but I meant the public perception of it
The shittiest "artist" I know of is Thomas Kinkade, and by him I mean the entire workshop under his name which takes a print of a painting and adds 1% of the detail so that they can sell it as technically being an original work. There's even an entire market for "his" work even if it was a pyramid scheme targeting the same right-wing hogs that
for AI slop today.
What's the public perception of him as the human artist who did the least amount of creative labour? He's regarded as a hack who sells completely generic kitsch. His prints are empty wall filler that you can only buy at craft stores, thrift shops, and his own pyramid scheme galleries. No one under the age of 90 would compliment the print if you hung it in your house and if anything you'd be negatively judged for it.
Even those have more value to me than all the world's water supply being diverted into making the best AI jpeg. No matter how intricate or costly or how many petabytes of data are ground up to make it, it's someone sitting at a computer and typing in a prompt to regenerate a randomised weighted average of someone else's work. No matter how much time and effort and hype went into any NFT project, everyone who wasn't in on the scam immediately understood they could just right click the jpeg and save it. The public also has access to image generators and can also type in "alan turing, oil painting, dark and kind of like Beksinski" with the same amount of ease. That's the path of least resistance compared to shopping for someone else's one sentence prompt and paying money for something I could instantly get for free.
i agree, but i feel like the public perception is so much different this time for some reason. nfts were seen as a joke or a curiosity, this time it's seen as more valid for some reason
What specific thing would you tie your idea of public perception to? Is there a single AI work which has been critically acclaimed by anyone except AI speculators? Is there a single coherently written book, show/film, or a jpeg with the same level of notoriety as any creative image the average person would recognise? Have you used it to make any image that you would put on any wall of your house? I think it's being sold as more valid by speculators who need it to be the next stupid tech bubble, but since 2022 I haven't seen any real-world presence apart from a few students using it to make terrible company logos with nonsensical text. The only online presence is slop created by speculators for the benefit of speculators and capitalists trying to ratfuck their marketing budget. The only positive reception for it seems to be from AI speculators, facebook meemaws who can't tell it's AI, and fascists on twitter who think Elon Musk will give them money if they make flattering slop for an AI speculator. To me it's that same exact dynamic of the only people telling me I need to buy an NFT also being people desperately trying to sell their NFT.
i dunno i guess that the art is getting sold for a lot right now reminds me of nfts. That and big companies getting on the wagon. The companies doing it and how they do it feels different, and the general discourse i see in media makes me think it's perceived differently than nfts are. I'm not really thinking very deeply about this, i don't have any specific thing to point you towards, i feel like you're reading my posts as being pro-ai or something. I think it's bullshit, but so are NFTs. NFTs weren't treated like harbingers of doom though and ai is
I don't think you're pro-AI, just that there's no reason to ever give AI the benefit of the doubt. It's being sold as more important but only by people selling it based on the prospect of how important it will be at some point. It's being sold at a high auction price, but with a low trading volume between career speculators who all stand to benefit from a headline like "AI painting sells for $1m". The companies using it in marketing are the same ones who half-bought into every tech thing in the past so that they could say they're keeping up with other companies. That's the same fundamental problem at bitcoin where I can do everything with my $80k monopoly money except buy any of the things I've purchased in the last 5 years.
I don't feel like I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt. I do feel as though others are though, which is why I'm asking if you think wether it will become a cultural mainstay or go the way of the NFT and become a big joke.
As soon as the speculative market crashes, which it will because the sector is wildly overvalued and you need much more data/power/water for each new generation, it will be just as culturally and practically irrelevant as the last bazinga thing. Unreliably generating an image uses about the same amount of power as charging a smartphone but nothing AI generates is worth paying for if a slightly worse model can do a slightly shittier version for free. When the investment funds dry up all of the companies pumping out this slop are going to try to pass the costs onto the people making the prompts, people who already see it as a free slop printer. That seems unsustainable.
thank you
It will go the way of the dutch tulips, yes.
Even the tulip mania had some kind of intrinsic value. The main "variety" that drove the speculative bubble was a normal tulip randomly infected with a virus in an era before microbiology. We had no way of knowing how to reproduce those tulips and the bust happened when traders sold more futures than could be grown. There's actual scarcity to that and I'd uniquely value it in the same way I would a plant with a variegation mutation. The speculative value is nonsensical but it's something I can't replicate.
Apparently it was also just something people did for fun during the off season. The only real sources we have about tulip mania is pamphlets written by christian prudes decades later
That was apparently not actually a real thing
IIRC it was real, but it wasn't as big or widespread a thing as the common retelling of it suggests. There was a speculative bubble that led to merchants making promises to buy however many bulbs from some farmers to get them to plant and grow them as a cash crop, and then they broke those agreements when the bubble popped leaving the farmers unpaid for their work. It didn't crash the economy or lead to famines or the like, it just led to some people skipping town, IIRC some court cases as farmers tried to get compensation for having been screwed over, and some farmers struggling more than they would have otherwise. It's biggest effect was a breakdown of trust since the idea that contracts could just be ignored like that was unthinkable and offensive and made people much more wary to work for a promise of money instead of money up front.
I just "know" what I remember from the extra history series. It wasn't ever really a big thing or a thing at all, though there was a minor dispute one season. It got resolved pretty well apparently. I think this is the video where they talk about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GApMtJ1QZQ&list=PLNzLIPV6_4lyKKRaCSdhxqnAZxdPWqcCK&index=5
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: