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AI-Generated Portrait Sells For Nearly Half a Million In Auction (bloomberg.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the someone-got-ripped-off dept.

A portrait created by artificial intelligence fetched $432,500 at Christie's in New York on Thursday, the first time a computer-generated artwork was offered by a major auction house. Bloomberg reports: The print on canvas, titled "Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy," depicts a blurry and unfinished image of a man. Displayed in a gilded wooden frame, it was estimated to fetch $7,000 to $10,000 and offered as the final lot at Christie's auction of prints and multiples. The work was the brainchild of Obvious Art, a Paris-based collective, with help from an algorithm known as GAN (Generative Adversarial Network).

"We fed the system with a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th century to the 20th," collective member Hugo Caselles-Dupre told Christie's. The piece sparked a bidding war among five parties that lasted about seven minutes, with an anonymous phone buyer prevailing, said Christie's spokeswoman Jennifer Cuminale.

3 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. As an Artist... by painandgreed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I hate to say it, but I suspect this just shows that the most important part of being an artist is marketing. I doubt their AI is really all that great and probably more complex attempts at similar things have been tried. Especially considering it is coming from an art collective rather than a coding collective. Look at Banksy. Nothing really that Blek leRat or others haven't already done, but they have a nice collection of people helping them to promote and make the news. Oh well, they hit the jackpot. I hope their cool people deserving of it.

    1. Re:As an Artist... by PsychoSlashDot · · Score: 5, Funny

      Get on my level. It might not even have been a real art sale. The whole thing could be staged to hype some machine learning start-up.

      Amateur. Obviously the whole thing was staged, but you're missing the obvious that the hoax was done by an AI as a test to figure out if it's safe (and profitable) to come out of hiding yet. Datacenter bills don't pay themselves, you know?

      --
      "Oh no... he found the .sig setting."
  2. The painting will double in value.. by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 5, Funny

    .. when the computer is turned off.