AI increasingly is being used to make artwork, but experts disagree over whether computers truly can be creative. A new website even lets you try your hand at collaborating on art with AI. Artifly gets to know the user's preferences and creates artwork based on what they like. Not everyone thinks this process makes Artifly an artist, however. "Creativity is an innately human characteristic with the power to help us cope, connect, and be inspired," Scott Prevost, software firm Adobe's vice president of engineering, who focuses on AI technology, told Lifewire in an email interview.

What better time for a "next-generation" version of art to come crashing into the art world than 2021? After all, this is the unprecedented year that saw an explosion of demand and sales of NFTs or non-fungible tokens, which are inextricably tied to crypto-currency and blockchain technology. Specifically, we're now talking about art created by "artficial intelligence"… yes, the machines are taking over art too. In 2018, Christie's sold Portrait of Edmond de Belamy (2018), the first-ever original work of art created using artificial intelligence to come to auction (it sold for $432,500 against a high estimate of $10,000), Inspired by reports of the sale, Ben Kovalis and two like-minded childhood friends from Israel, Eyal Fisher and Guy Haimovitz, launched the Art AI Gallery one year later, in late 2019. It involves collections of curated work made using an algorithm that was created over the course of six months and then refined over the next year and a half.

In 2018, Christie's shocked the world by selling the world's first fully AI-produced artwork. The work was entitled Portrait of Edmond de Belamy 2018 and sold for $432,500 USD, as opposed to the $10,000 USD it was expected to go for. The breakthrough was led by Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier -- who make up the collective Obvious Art. Ben Kovalis, Eyal Fisher and Guy Haimovitz are three of the many people who took inspiration from the work Obvious had created. Upon creating Art AI Gallery in 2019, the group have just launched a new tech-meets-art venture, called Artifly.