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."
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