On March 11, 2021, the auction house Christie's sold a work by an American graphic designer, Michael Winkelmann, a.k.a. Beeple, for a colossal $69 million, making it the third most expensive work ever sold by a living artist. The work, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, is a nonfungible token, or NFT. It's a computer file that cannot be exchanged, copied, or destroyed, which gives the purchaser proof of authenticity. It lives online in a virtual space--an immaterial space--in a blockchain, a secure digital public ledger.

It's a startling image that illustrates the deep-rooted biases of AI research. Input a low-resolution picture of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, into an algorithm designed to generate depixelated faces, and the output is a white man. Get the same algorithm to generate high-resolution images of actress Lucy Liu or congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from low-resolution inputs, and the resulting faces look distinctly white. As one popular tweet quoting the Obama example put it: "This image speaks volumes about the dangers of bias in AI." But what's causing these outputs and what do they really tell us about AI bias?

We're still trying to figure out the best applications for neural networks, machine learning, and all the recent advancements in artificial intelligence. Amongst all the practical research being conducted, there's also lots of frivolous experimentation being done with results that walk the line between fascinating and terrifying. Automated image processing has emerged as a strong suit of artificial neural networks, fuelled in part by decades of everyone sharing photos and selfies of each other on the internet. It's resulted in vast archives of headshots being harvested and used to train AIs to do everything from artificially aging users in novelty mobile apps to generating huge collections of photorealistic headshots of people that don't actually exist. The stock photography industry will never be the same, but Mario Klingemann wondered what would happen if those same artificial neural networks churning out fake headshots were synced to music, generating the most expressive faces when a song's beat is really banging.

The advent of general adversarial networks (GANs) has led to increased popularity and adoption of artificial intelligence in the art world. It has been quite a few years since researchers have been trying to infuse the artistic skills into AI and there have been many interesting developments since then. Artists such as Mario Klingemann, Anna Ridler and many others have been at the forefront of this new-age GAN-powered art. Not only is AI creating breathtaking artwork but it is also being sold at auctions for hefty amounts. For instance, Canadian-Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has already made around $600,000 for an AI artwork.

Machine learning can be a fantastic tool for creators, but integrating AI into your workflow is a challenge for those who can't code. A new program called Runway ML aims to make this process easier by providing artists, designers, filmmakers, and others with an "app store" of machine learning applications that can be activated with a few clicks. Say you're an animator on a budget who wants to turn a video of a human actor into a 3D model. Instead of hiring expensive motion capture equipment, you could use Runway to apply a neural network called "PosetNet" to your footage, creating wireframe models of your actor that can then be exported for animation. Or say you need to remove a coffee cup that was accidentally left in a shot on your high-budget fantasy TV drama.

This paper proposes a way to understand neural network artworks as juxtapositions of natural image cues. It is hypothesized that images with unusual combinations of realistic visual cues are interesting, and, neural models trained to model natural images are well-suited to creating interesting images. Art using neural models produces new images similar to those of natural images, but with weird and intriguing variations. This analysis is applied to neural art based on Generative Adversarial Networks, image stylization, Deep Dreams, and Perception Engines.

Training algorithms to generate art is, in some ways, the easy part. You feed them data, they look for patterns, and they do their best to replicate what they've seen. But like all automatons, AI systems are tireless and produce a never-ending stream of images. The tricky part, says German AI artist Mario Klingemann, is knowing what to do with it all. "For me, this potential is what makes it both interesting and difficult," Klingemann tells The Verge.

Mario Klingemann, a German artist who uses AI in his work, has radical views on creativity. "Humans are not original," he says. "We only reinvent, make connections between things we have seen." While humans can only build on what we have learned and what others have done before us, "machines can create from scratch". Setting aside whether or not human creativity is limited and indeed what precisely creativity is, it's certainly true that artificial neural networks being developed today work out the rules as they go along, rather than being taught.

Is the art world ready for AI? Christie's held the first-ever auction of art created by artificial intelligence. By Thomas Mulier Four months ago, Christie's said it held the first-ever auction of art created by artificial intelligence. The $432,500 sale sparked a controversy among critics over whether it's really AI-generated if a human was involved in making the portrait. Next month, a new Sotheby's sale in London may end the dispute and could even presage a boom in AI-generated art, which until now has been relatively scarce. The firm will take bids for a piece made by German computer scientist Mario Klingemann on March 6 in London.

Art-lovers staring at these portraits will be the first, and last, to ever do so. The creation is the first self-generative AI artwork to go to auction created and only the second piece of art to be sold that uses AI. Artificial intelligence generates the images from scratch and produces an endless sequence of unique male and female portraits that have never been seen before and will never appear again. It is called Memories of Passersby 1, and is set to go to auction at Sotheby's in London on March 6 with an estimated value of between £30,00 and £40,000. Two screens are attached to a retro-style wooden sideboard which contains the AI'brain' and this produces the endless stream of art with a male-like image and a feminine image on separate displays.