Christie's Is First to Sell Art Made by Artificial Intelligence, But What Does That Mean?

On Thursday, the AI-generated "Portrait of Edmond Belamy" sold for $432,500--some 45 times its estimated value--in a sale trumpeted by Christie's as the first auction to feature work created by artificial intelligence. It's a moment likely to be marked in the timeline of both AI and art history, but what, exactly, does the sale signify? For the AI community, the Verge's James Vincent writes in the days preceding the bidding war, the auction provoked controversy among those who argued that the humans behind the canvas (a trio of 25-year-olds best known as the Paris-based art collective Obvious) relied heavily on 19-year-old Robbie Barrat's algorithms yet failed to sufficiently credit him. If the work was truly authored by this string of numbers and letters, does it matter who built and trained the AI? And, given the relatively blurred, imprecise vision the portrait--which Vulture art critic Jerry Saltz scathingly describes as "100 percent generic"--offers of its dour-looking subject, does "Edmond Belamy" even deserve a place in the art history canon? There are no straightforward answers to these questions.