For the first time ever a piece of art created by An Artificial Intelligence program sold at an art Auction for almost 45 times its estimated value.

For the first time ever a piece of art created by An Artificial Intelligence program sold at an art Auction for almost 45 times its estimated value. For more on the story here is Zachary Devita.

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.

Edmond de Belamy

In press materials for "Gradient Descent," Nature Morte stated that the works are created "entirely by AI in collaboration with artists." Obvious even signed their work with the mathematical equation for the algorithm they used, rather than the collective's name. As much as artists and gallerists may enjoy attributing authorship to AI, and emphasize that they cannot anticipate just what an AI algorithm will produce, legally, there is no doubt as to whether it's the human artist or the AI who owns the finished work. AI is simply a tool artists use, the way a photographer uses a camera or Adobe Photoshop in the creation of their images, says Jessica Fjeld, assistant director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School. "Humans are deeply involved with every aspect of the creation and training of today's AI technologies, and this will continue to be true tomorrow and for the foreseeable future," Fjeld says.

Christie's will auction off an artificial intelligence (AI) artwork for the first time this October, hard on the heels of a pioneering all-AI art exhibition held at …