Has Artificial Intelligence Given Us the Next Great Art Movement? Experts Say Slow Down, the 'Field Is in Its Infancy'

The news that Christie's would sell an artwork made by artificial intelligence this October captured worldwide headlines and imaginations alike. Portrait of Edmond de Belamy (2018), an uncanny, algorithm-created rendering of an aristocratic gentleman, will hit the auction block in New York with an estimate of $7,000 to $10,000. But the piece's inclusion in such a high-profile sale is creating controversy far ahead of the auction itself. While images generated using AI technology have been circulating relatively widely since Google's pattern-finding software DeepDream roared onto the scene in 2015, the field was still young, and the artworks produced via AI were neither aesthetically nor conceptually rich enough to hold the attention of the art world for long. But after the heavyweight auction house announced it was ready to sell this latest work, the mysterious portrait--and the even more mysterious algorithm behind it--were cast by many in the media as the new standard-bearers for the genre.