And finally…AI artwork sells for $432,500 — nearly 45 times its estimate

A work of art created by an algorithm has been sold at auction for $432,000 (£337,000), nearly 45 times its high estimate.

The piece, generated by an Artificial Intelligence programme, had been projected to fetch around $7,000-$10,000, an estimate put on it by Christie’s in New York before the sale.

The painting, if that is the right term, called Portrait of Edmond Belamy, is one of a group of portraits of the fictional Belamy family created by Obvious, a Paris-based collective consisting of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier.

They are engaged in exploring the interface between art and artificial intelligence, and their method goes by the acronym GAN, which stands for ‘generative adversarial network’.

“The algorithm is composed of two parts,” says Caselles-Dupré. “On one side is the Generator, on the other the Discriminator. We fed the system with a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th century to the 20th. The Generator makes a new image based on the set, then the Discriminator tries to spot the difference between a human-made image and one created by the Generator. The aim is to fool the Discriminator into thinking that the new images are real-life portraits. Then we have a result.”

To generate the image, the algorithm compared its own work to those in the data set until it could not tell them apart.

The portrait is the first piece of AI art to go under the hammer at a major auction house. The sale attracted a significant amount of media attention.

“AI is just one of several technologies that will have an impact on the art market of the future - although it is far too early to predict what those changes might be,” said Christie’s specialist Richard Lloyd, who organised the sale.