I know commenters will probably be outraged by this sale, but to me this is just the status quo of the modern art scene. The high end art scene hasn’t been about appreciating the art itself since Andy Warhol (at least). The scene is just a bunch of people with too much money all pretending to be intellectuals to each other and buying garbage to prove how deep and meaningful it is. There’s probably also an element of money funny business as well, but I’m not versed enough to say the exact mechanisms, just that I feel in my bones that when people are trading around multi-million dollar paintings among other people in the scene that I am suspicious. There is as much personal expression and meaning in the AI creation as there is in most other pieces being pumped out.

I have exactly as much respect for the AI art generator as I do for the rest of the human high end artists churning out junk for rich people.

Julia was twenty-six years old… and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor… She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She “didn’t much care for reading,” she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

– George Orwell, 1984

Thats just money laundering

It’s the latest example of rich technologists making a mockery of the human estate. Every piece of our humanity they touch turns to gold for them and ashes for everyone else.