Christie's sells its first AI portrait for $432,500, beating estimates of $10,000

Christie's has sold its first piece of AI art, a canvas named the Portrait of Edmond Belamy, for $432,500. The sale is unusual not only as a first for the 252-year-old auction house, but because the expected price for the print was between $7,000 and $10,000. The artwork was created by a collective named Obvious. The three members of Obvious, a trio of 25-year-old French students, used a type of machine learning algorithm known as a GAN (generative adversarial network) to create the picture. The network was trained on a dataset of historical portraits, and then it tried to create one of its own.