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.

WHAT: White works with neural networks called Convolutional Neural Networks, or CNNs. These networks are used in today's computer vision applications to give modern machine-learning systems the ability to perceive the world through vision--for example, systems that filter obscene images from your Google search. In his work, White investigates the perceptual abilities of these systems by finding abstract forms that are meaningful to them. Trained on a set of images of real-life objects, the machine creates abstract representational prints until the forms created register as the specific objects, such as a starfish or a cabbage, when they are run through other AI systems to confirm. Some of the results register as "very likely obscene" when they are run through systems trained to filter obscene content, even though they might not register that way to us humans.