AI robot’s millions of paintings, does it understand the warmth and coldness of the human world?
Author：Eve Cole
Update Time：2024-11-14 19:18:01
Will humans and AI meet at the pinnacle of art? From October 31st to November 7th, New York time, AI artist Ai-Da's painting "God of AI" was auctioned by Sotheby's in the UK. This large portrait of "Father of AI" Turing is 2.2 meters high and has an estimated value of US$120,000-180,000 (equivalent to approximately RMB 850,000-1.28 million). On the first day of the auction, a bidder bid US$120,000 (equivalent to approximately RMB 850,000). By the end of the auction, if no one bids higher, the sale will be made at that price. In addition to the novelty, it can be clearly felt that the spiritual and artistic fields that we earlier labeled as unique to humans have now become places where AI has entered. Some orders and standards regarding expression and creation, creativity and imagination seem to be being redefined. Bid one million, it's rare . Go to the Sotheby's auction house website, and there is only one auction item in the "Digital Art Day Auction" - "The God of AI" by Ai-Da. The public information is extremely simple, with only a few words indicating the artist, the size of the canvas, the time of creation and the estimate.
Sotheby's Auction House Ai-Da's "God of AI" auction situation (picture source network screenshot) "Needless to say, the author is the biggest selling point." Shen Linfeng, a teacher at the School of Chinese Painting at the China Academy of Art, has been paying attention to this auction. He told reporters that the humanoid robot Ai-Da, since it was created by Aidan Mailer, director of the Oxford University Art Gallery, has been dressed like a student back then, with a mushroom head and overalls. But after five years of training, she has used her increasingly advanced AI brain and body of steel to draw the Queen of England and attend the British Parliament. Her works are so rich that she will have a solo exhibition at the Design Museum in London in 2021. Fully practicing her famous saying: "I'mnotalive, but Iamstillcapableofcreatingart." (I am not alive, but I am capable of creating art.)
"God of AI" (Source: Sotheby's official website) Shen Linfeng used several "interesting" words to express his appreciation for Ai-Da's paintings. He feels that such a technique, with a bit of impressionistic "stippling" and a bit of modern variation, is unforgettable. "But if you look closely at "The God of AI", every detail in it draws on the work of various artists." Shen Huaqing, deputy director of the Design Art Department of the School of Art and Archeology of Zhejiang University, emphasized to reporters: Ai-Da is not a human being, it has no Awareness, "There is no reference system for comparison between his works and the artist's works." Shen Huaqing said bluntly that this time, what he bought with real money was not a work of art, but a scarcity. "The second painting "The God of AI" "It's not worth anything anymore." As early as 2018, a "Portrait of Edmund de Bellamy" completed by AI was sold for US$432,500 (equivalent to RMB 3.07 million at the time). But the person in the painting does not really exist, but was automatically generated by AI after learning 15,000 portraits from the 14th to 20th centuries, and was spray-painted on the canvas by three young guys from the French art group Obvious. Many people in the industry have expressed that the auction of Ai-Da's "God of AI" is worth looking forward to. "Previously, the creation of generative AI can only be called images." Shen Linfeng said that images are not paintings. Painting has a practical process and is placed in a specific historical context. In his view, "The God of AI" painted by Ai-Da with a brush in hand is the first AI painting to be sold at the auction house. "The questions and challenges it poses to art history have also made people inside and outside the industry share Attention". Shen Huaqing gave the reporter an analogy. Just like the first person to eat a crab is brave, it is also like the first iron tool that represents human civilization from the Paleolithic Age to the Neolithic Age, and the first iron tool that changes from cold weapons to hot weapons. "Someone is willing to pay a million dollars for this painting. They are paying for this courage and this unique epoch-making significance." A rival or a co-creator? The fact that Ai-Da's "God of AI" was auctioned at a high price has inevitably become the starting point for everyone's thinking: When AI enters the game, what kind of future will the art world and creators face? Where will creation go? Picasso once said: goodartistscopygreatartistsstill (imitation is the first step for an artist). "It can no longer be said that AI is simply imitating." Jin Yudong, author of "Hello Algorithm" who focuses on 3D vision research, emphasized the term "intelligence emergence". From quantitative changes to qualitative changes, the development of technology is changing the process of artistic creation—— The AI model gradually imitates the essence by learning a large amount of data, and even draws inferences from one example to achieve transcendence, opening the field of artistic creation to AI. "Cyber art may become an art category." AIGC creator Deng Li pointed out in an interview with the media. "This time dimension will be very long. First, AI must be popularized. Only after popularization can culture and aesthetics be formed. Birth.” Therefore, today’s AI art is “still a false proposition.” Ultimately, AI and art are more like opposites: AI produces something rationally and orderly, but art is often the product of the disordered and emotional part of the human brain. "Even though AI has developed to a certain stage, many people who use AI to generate pictures say it is like a blind box." Jin Yudong said frankly that nowadays, given prompts with hundreds of words, the results obtained are very likely It's full of randomness. He took "crying" as an example. No matter how you add modifiers, AI will calmly express "crying" by combining fixed expressions, actions, etc. in the database. "Compared to human artists, it is difficult to inject emotion and soul into the work." Industry insiders all say that it is too early to talk about AI threat and replacement theories. If AI is an opponent, it is actually a useful tool. "Before, in the art field, especially the visual art field, it was difficult to achieve a collision of styles of different artists. Now I can achieve good cooperation with AI." Artist Yuan Bo, who loves AIGC, said that he seemed to have met Co-create (co-create). creator), "I no longer need to write countless drafts. I am responsible for imagining and trying, and AI is responsible for adjustment and presentation, thereby greatly broadening the freedom of creation while maintaining efficiency." "The main goal of AI is to use scarce resources The cost should be reduced as much as possible," Jin Yudong explained from the technical origin. In the field of art creation in my country, AI is also playing a variety of roles, bringing a new artistic experience. Gemini, an AI robot painter developed by Hong Kong artist Wong Hong-tat, can create Chinese paintings on its own without human intervention. Four years ago, Shen Huaqing brought generative AI to the classroom of graduate students at Zhejiang University. He often encourages students to try to use AI to create works, use it to expand, extend, and integrate different styles, and draw inspiration from it. He believes that "aesthetics, analysis, judgment, and understanding of art in a broad sense, as well as cross-field and cross-disciplinary integration, are new requirements for artists in the AI era." AI not only affects individuals and groups, but also affects, through impact and integration, "Fighting" with existing creative methods and aesthetic standards has become a part of the iteration and development of the art era. Shen Linfeng shared with reporters the surprises he encountered during his research on "artistic synesthesia". As a "layman" in music creation, when he first used Suno, known as "ChatGPT in the music industry", he only needed to enter a few words and get a song with connected words and music in seconds. It’s wonderful, “This couldn’t have been done before.” When the threshold is lowered, enough people will break through barriers and create innovations with the help of AI. In this process, more genius works and genius artists will surely emerge. "Shen Linfeng is full of expectations. In 2024, the China Academy of Art established an AI center to explore the wonderful interaction of the two "AIs" Artificial Intelligence (artificial intelligence) and Artistic Intelligence (artistic intelligence). "After all, this is changing the model of human-machine collaboration. "An epoch-making product". Who owns the copyright of non-"human" paintings? In addition to vague definitions and hidden concerns about artistic ethics, more art and creators are concerned about "copyright". They are worried that their original works of art will become AI The artist's training data has become common and therefore devalued. The world-renowned book publishing company Penguin Random House clearly warns AI on the copyright page of its books that it is prohibited to use or copy any part of its books in any way for training. AI technology or systems aim to "vigorously defend the intellectual property rights belonging to our authors and artists." According to reports, on October 22, more than 15,000 visual artists, writers, musicians and other creative people signed an open letter. , warned AI companies not to use their creative works to train AI without permission, saying that this poses a "significant and unfair threat to the livelihood of the artists behind the works and must not be allowed." On the other hand, people are also talking. : When an AI work is auctioned, who will own the copyright? Does the painting drawn by the robot belong to the robot or to the person who created the robot? "From the perspective of China's Copyright Law, is the prerequisite for a work to be copyrighted? , it is the 'people' who play a big role in the specific creative process expressed in the work, and have certain intellectual investment and originality. "Zhang Yanlai, a lawyer who has represented the world's first AIGC platform infringement case and director of Zhejiang Kenting Law Firm, "For example, when using generative AI to create, repeatedly inputting prompt words, modifications, tuning, etc. can be considered to have considerable intelligence. Engagement or originality. " The most iconic example comes from last November, when the Beijing Internet Court made a ruling on the copyright infringement dispute of "AI Wen Sheng Tu". According to Zhang Yanlai, in this case, the keywords given by the user were relatively complex, and the judgment was also unfair to the user. For works like Ai-Da, which are entirely created by robots, there are no relevant copyright cases at home or abroad. Zhang Yanlai said frankly: “Commercially, this work can be auctioned, and the auctioneer has its property rights. From the perspective of paintings, it is difficult to protect them under current laws. "This means that if someone uses the auctioned "God of AI" as a commercial poster, advertising, etc., it is difficult to determine infringement according to current laws. It is difficult for us to predict: What kind of impact AI will bring to art The future? What is certain is that AI artistic creation is gradually being accepted by the market, and its value and influence are constantly growing. When AI enters the market, changes will definitely occur in the future, which may be impact, integration, or mutual resistance. It forces us to take the initiative to re-examine the nature and value of art. As Lewis Mumford, an American scholar of humanist philosophy of technology, said: Technology is just an element of human culture, and it is human beings who make requirements and guarantees. Spiritual tasks.
