First Ever AI Generated Portrait Sells For a Massive $432,500 At Auction
The canvas print is called “Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy,”
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A portrait generated by an artificial intelligence has sold for $432,500 at Christie's in New York on Thursday making it one of the first pieces of computer-generated art to sell at a major auction house.
The AI artist even signs the artwork - min G max D Ex[log(D(x))] + Ez[log(1-D(G(z)))] - which was created by Paris-based collective, Obvious Art, by use of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) - a sophisticated algorithm.
The canvas print is called “Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy,” which shows a blurry and unfinished image of a man.
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The art is currently inside a wooden frame, it was estimated to be sold for $7,000 to $10,000 and offered as the closing lot at Christie’s auction of prints and multiples. -Bloomberg
"We fed the system with a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th century to the 20th," said collective member Hugo Caselles-Dupre.
A bidding battle erupted over Edmond, with five prospective customers going back and forth for around seven minutes.
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Finally, an anonymous phone buyer prevailed according to Christie's spokeswoman Jennifer Cuminale.
"It is an exciting moment, and we hope that the spotlight on this sale will bring forward the amazing work that our predecessors and colleagues have been producing," reads a statement from the collective.
"We are grateful to Christie’s for opening up this dialogue in the art community and honored to have been a part of this global conversation about the impact of this new technology in the creation of art."
