Portrait “Painted” by Artificial Intelligence Sold for $432,000

Image via obvious_art/Instagram

We always thought that artificial intelligence (AI) might do a lot of things better than humans, but that art won’t be one of them.

This is where we were wrong.

A portrait “painted” by artificial intelligence (AI) program was offered for an auction at Christie’s auction house in New York City and ended up being sold for $432,000 to an anonymous buyer. This was the first time that an algorithm created art piece made its way to an auction.

The painting, titled “Portrait of Edmond De Belamy,” is the creation of an algorithm developed by the Parisian art collective Obvious.

“The algorithm is composed of two parts,” – explained Obvious’ Hugo Caselles-Dupré. “On one side is the Generator, on the other the Discriminator. We fed the system with a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th century to the 20th. The Generator makes a new image based on the set, then the Discriminator tries to spot the difference between a human-made image and one created by the Generator. The aim is to fool the Discriminator into thinking that the new images are real-life portraits. Then we have a result.”

After the AI created the image, Obvious inkjet-printed it on canvas and offered it on auction via Christie’s. The estimated value of this “art piece” was $7,000 to $10,000.

You can check out some of the images of “Portrait of Edmond De Belamy,” as well as the video of the algorithm that created the portrait.