Think about it – what's the first thought that comes to your mind when you think about Data Science? Here's what I'm proposing – how about we explore the road less traveled? In this weird and wacky world, our data science work reflects surprising connections, such as – if you are buying diapers then you are most likely to buy beer. Or, people who go to bars are a higher credit risk! Oh, I cannot miss out on this one – Smart people prefer curly fries.

This month, Christie's will become the first auction house to bring a piece of AI (artificial intelligence) art to auction. The work is titled Portrait of Edmond Belamy and it is by the French artist collective Obvious. This story has captured the public's imagination and has been all over the mainstream media. And what the media have told you… well, it is all wrong. I've got to be honest with you, we have totally lost control of how the press talks about us.

One Thursday last month, 19-year-old Robbie Barrat woke to a fusillade of messages on his phone. "I was half asleep but saw they all contained the same number," he says. "Then I fell back asleep for a few hours. I didn't really want to believe." The number in those messages was $432,500--the winning bid at Christie's New York on a ghostly portrait created using artificial intelligence, following a recipe Barrat posted online not long after graduating high school.

Three guys from France recently used an open-source generative adverserial network (GAN) trained on public domain images to create a "painting." That painting today sold for nearly half a million dollars at one of the most prestigious auction houses in London. A couple weeks ago world-renowned artist and prankster Banksy pulled off a good one. He sold a painting at auction that shredded itself as soon as the winning bid was accepted. But that's nothing compared to duping someone out of $432K by selling them a painting that was generated by a neural network you found on Github. If you haven't heard its backstory already, you're in for a treat.

Christie's has sold its first piece of AI art, a canvas named the Portrait of Edmond Belamy, for $432,500. The sale is unusual not only as a first for the 252-year-old auction house, but because the expected price for the print was between $7,000 and $10,000. The artwork was created by a collective named Obvious. The three members of Obvious, a trio of 25-year-old French students, used a type of machine learning algorithm known as a GAN (generative adversarial network) to create the picture. The network was trained on a dataset of historical portraits, and then it tried to create one of its own.

As Quartz reports, a West Virginia teenager has created an artificial intelligence emcee whose style is based entirely on Kanye West's body of work. "All of the sudden I had a week to make a neural network that could rap," Barrat explained to Quartz. A self-taught programmer, Barrat cooked up most of the code for his digital lyricist in the course of one afternoon; it only took him a few extra days to complete the effort. The West Virginia teen's AI rapper takes its cues from 6,000 different Kanye West lines and is able to produce its own bars and flows like a traditional artist would. "Originally it just rearranged existing rap lyrics, but now it can actually write word-by-word," Barrat says.