The Getty Museum has acquired its very first AI-generated photograph for its collection. This comes despite both ethical and legal concerns about the production and curation of AI-generated works of art.
Cristian en el Amor de Calle is an AI-generated photograph by the Costa Rican photographer Matías Sauter Morera. It shows two young men in blue leather jackets sitting together, both looking at the viewer. Much of Sauter Morera’s work focuses on identity, with this work, part of a larger series, looking at the intersection of queerness and latinidad. The photograph is said to be inspired by the pegamachos, the farmhands and ranch workers in Costa Rica’s Guanacaste province, bordering the Pacific Ocean. These Costa Rican cowboys would, beginning in the 1970s, engage in love affairs with local men while not abandoning the label of heterosexual. The use of AI in Sauter Morera’s work is partly to protect the identities of actual gay men in the country. Even though Costa Rica is considered progressive for Central America as far as queer rights are concerned, precautions still need to be taken in some parts of the country.
Sauter Morera used a combination of AI models in Adobe Photoshop to generate his images. The Getty Museum acquired Cristian en el Amor de Calle through Paul Martineau, an associate curator at the Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs. Despite the focus on AI, Martineau and the Getty consider the work primarily a photograph instead of an AI-generated artwork. Cristian en el Amor de Calle will be featured at Sauter Morera’s solo exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica starting on March 22nd before moving to a group show at the Getty Museum beginning June 17th.
The ethics of using AI in this context is rather complicated. In this specific case, Sauter Morera used it to generate the desired image without compromising the identities of queer people, whose lives and livelihoods may be at risk depending on their location. However, many segments of the art world, particularly artists, have been rallying against the greater inclusion of AI in their spaces. An open letter signed by thousands of artists recently called upon Christie’s to cancel an upcoming auction dedicated to AI-generated art. It’s a relatively small sale, with only thirty-four lots expected to make around $600K. However, regardless of its size, the sale may be used in the same way that the sale of Beeple’s NFT works at Christie’s legitimized a creative medium that is now starting to quickly fall out of favor. Many fear that this auction may generate publicity and lend legitimacy to art created not by an artist who may be struggling to support themselves, but by a machine trained on millions of images. Refik Anadol, one of the artists participating in the scheduled Christie’s sale, commented that the letter was an example of “lazy critic practices and doomsday hysteria driven by dark minds.” However, on top of the ethical concerns, there are ongoing legal battles regarding the nature of art generated through AI models.
In recent court battles, judges in the United States have allowed lawsuits to continue against the technology companies that developed the several main AI models used today. Last August, Judge William Orrick wrote that because many of the AI image generators could create a work in another artist’s style simply by using the artist’s name as a prompt, the technology companies that developed these generators may be liable for trademark and copyright infringement. He wrote that these programs were “created to facilitate [copyright] infringement by design”. Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, two of the artists party to that lawsuit, are signatories to the open letter to Christie’s. The letter reads, “These [AI] models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them.” Despite arranging the sale, Christie’s vice president Nicole Sales Giles insisted that the auction house believes that “AI is not a replacement for human creativity.”
The Christie’s sale, called Augmented Intelligence, is still scheduled to close on March 5th.
Institutions Lean Into AI, Despite Artists’ Objections
Cristian en el Amor de Calle is an AI-generated photograph by the Costa Rican photographer Matías Sauter Morera. It shows two young men in blue leather jackets sitting together, both looking at the viewer. Much of Sauter Morera’s work focuses on identity, with this work, part of a larger series, looking at the intersection of queerness and latinidad. The photograph is said to be inspired by the pegamachos, the farmhands and ranch workers in Costa Rica’s Guanacaste province, bordering the Pacific Ocean. These Costa Rican cowboys would, beginning in the 1970s, engage in love affairs with local men while not abandoning the label of heterosexual. The use of AI in Sauter Morera’s work is partly to protect the identities of actual gay men in the country. Even though Costa Rica is considered progressive for Central America as far as queer rights are concerned, precautions still need to be taken in some parts of the country.
Sauter Morera used a combination of AI models in Adobe Photoshop to generate his images. The Getty Museum acquired Cristian en el Amor de Calle through Paul Martineau, an associate curator at the Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs. Despite the focus on AI, Martineau and the Getty consider the work primarily a photograph instead of an AI-generated artwork. Cristian en el Amor de Calle will be featured at Sauter Morera’s solo exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica starting on March 22nd before moving to a group show at the Getty Museum beginning June 17th.
The ethics of using AI in this context is rather complicated. In this specific case, Sauter Morera used it to generate the desired image without compromising the identities of queer people, whose lives and livelihoods may be at risk depending on their location. However, many segments of the art world, particularly artists, have been rallying against the greater inclusion of AI in their spaces. An open letter signed by thousands of artists recently called upon Christie’s to cancel an upcoming auction dedicated to AI-generated art. It’s a relatively small sale, with only thirty-four lots expected to make around $600K. However, regardless of its size, the sale may be used in the same way that the sale of Beeple’s NFT works at Christie’s legitimized a creative medium that is now starting to quickly fall out of favor. Many fear that this auction may generate publicity and lend legitimacy to art created not by an artist who may be struggling to support themselves, but by a machine trained on millions of images. Refik Anadol, one of the artists participating in the scheduled Christie’s sale, commented that the letter was an example of “lazy critic practices and doomsday hysteria driven by dark minds.” However, on top of the ethical concerns, there are ongoing legal battles regarding the nature of art generated through AI models.
In recent court battles, judges in the United States have allowed lawsuits to continue against the technology companies that developed the several main AI models used today. Last August, Judge William Orrick wrote that because many of the AI image generators could create a work in another artist’s style simply by using the artist’s name as a prompt, the technology companies that developed these generators may be liable for trademark and copyright infringement. He wrote that these programs were “created to facilitate [copyright] infringement by design”. Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, two of the artists party to that lawsuit, are signatories to the open letter to Christie’s. The letter reads, “These [AI] models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them.” Despite arranging the sale, Christie’s vice president Nicole Sales Giles insisted that the auction house believes that “AI is not a replacement for human creativity.”
The Christie’s sale, called Augmented Intelligence, is still scheduled to close on March 5th.