Source: Cnet
A painting generated by artificial intelligence was sold at a Christie’s auction last week for nearly half a million dollars.
The painting titled “Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy” was sold for $432,500, although Christie’s estimated it at $7,000 to $10,000.
The portrait was created by French art collective Obvious, and it was marketed by Christie’s as the first AI-made painting sold at an auction, the New York Times reported.
For comparison, the work sold for the same price as Pablo Picasso’s linocut “Buste de femme d’apres Cranach le Jeune”.
The sale didn’t go without it’s fair share controversy, as some criticized the Obvious claiming that the Generative Adversarial Network algorithm (GAN) which they used to create the work has been used by many other artists for years now.
It should be noted that Obvious didn’t shy away from this fact and in their statement paid credit to others who used AI in art, most notably Ian Goodfellow, who created the GAN algorithm, and artist Robbie Barrat whom they cite as a great influence on their work.
“It is an exciting moment and our hope is that the spotlight on this sale will bring forward the amazing work that our predecessors and colleagues have been producing,” Obvious said.
Barrat also used GAN in his work, and most notable results are the nude portraits that the AI algorithm created. As Barrat noted himself, AI painted people as “blobs of flesh with tendrils and limbs randomly growing out,” with a slightly chilling question in the end: “I wonder if that’s how machines see us”.
Here are some AI generated nude portraits I’ve been working on?
Usually the machine just paints people as blobs of flesh with tendrils and limbs randomly growing out – I think it’s really surreal. I wonder if that’s how machines see us… pic.twitter.com/tYgzCHGfse
— Robbie Barrat (@DrBeef_) 27 March 2018
