Painting Made by Artificial Intelligence Sells for $432,500

An artwork made by an artificial intelligence program sold at a Christie's auction for $432,500, nearly 45 times its high estimate. Portrait of Edmond Belamy, a painting created by a Paris-based art collective called Obvious, was generated by using an algorithm and a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th and 20th centuries. It sold during the October 23-25 Prints & Multiples sale at Christie's, making it the first piece of AI art to go under the hammer at a major auction house, Christie's said. The art collective comprises of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier, and uses a method called GAN -- an acronym for generative adversarial network -- to explore the intersection of art and artificial intelligence. In place of a signature, the blurry portrait is signed with the equation used to generate the painting.