Christie's Will Be the First Auction House to Sell Art Made by Artificial Intelligence

At first glance, portraits of the Belamy family seem to exemplify life in the upper echelons of French society. The haughty features of patriarch Le Comte De Belamy are framed by a voluminous white powdered wig, while the dynastic matriarch, La Comtesse, oozes wealth in her colorful silk attire. Skipping ahead several generations, you'll encounter Madame De Belamy, whose tightly coiffed hair is tucked inside a blue hat rendered in Impressionistic strokes, and her son Edmond, a comparatively dour-looking young man clad almost entirely in black. Although its members' names and places in the family tree were assigned by Obvious, a Paris-based art collective, their likenesses are the brainchild of Generative Adversarial Networks, a machine learning algorithm better known by the acronym GAN. Now, Naomi Rea writes for Artnet News, the youngest member of the family--as depicted in "Portrait of Edmond Belamy"--is set to make history as the subject of the first AI-produced artwork sold by an auction house.