Artwork created with artificial intelligence fetches more than $400K US at major auction

The computer-printed Portrait of Edmond Belamy earned nearly 45 times its high estimate when it went under the hammer at Christie's in New York.

The sale marks the first time the historicauction house has sold any piece created by artificial intelligence. Thesale of the printto an anonymous bidder for $432,500 US is also notable because the portraitwas only expected to fetch a maximum of $10,000 US.

The work was developedby an art collective calledObvious, three 25-year-old French students.

The portrait is a dark and blurry image of what appearsto bea historic painting of a gentleman, in a gold frame, complete with asignature that's not a person's name, but rather a small bitof the codeused to create it.

The GANalgorithm

Thealgorithm is calledGAN, (Generative Adversarial Network) and has two parts. The first, the generator, spits outimages based on a very large bank of portraits fed to it. For Portrait of Edmond Belamy,15,000 historical portraits were inputted into the system.

The second part, the discriminator, tries to figure out which images are human made and which are AI created.

The Belamywas one of the portraits that fooled the computerinto thinking it was human generated. The collective hascreated a totalof eleven portraits, as part of a fictionalBelamy family series, all with the help of AI.

The selling at a major auction house of a work generated usingAI raises many questions about art that AI researchers are just starting to grapple with.

Who should get the proceeds of the sale,if, as in this case, part of the code used was actually created by someone else?

The Obvious collective acknowledgesthey borrowed the algorithmof Robbie Barrat, a 19-year-old artist and programmer who'd shared his work online as open-source code.

The money is going to Obvious, not Barrat.

"The proceeds from the recent and forthcoming sales will be usedto further the collective's research into training its algorithm and to finance the computationpower needed to produce this type of artwork,"a Christie's spokesperson toldCBC News.

What is art?

In addition to assessing the value of the art, there are also concerns about whetheran image created by AI should truly be considered art. What aboutif a human audience can't tell it was a machine that createdit? Or, if humans feel inspired by machine made works - does it then qualify asart?

For artists who use AI as a tool, the big question likely is, 'Who is theartist here, the human or the machine?"

In any case, this big, flashy sale has blastedall these discussionsout of the world of AI computer labs, and out onto theworld stage to consider and debate.