Artificial intelligence painting sold at auction for the first time

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

At the last auction of the Christieʼs auction house, it was decided to include a painting with the title "Portrait of Edmond de Belamy" in the list of lots. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that it was not created by a great artist, but is a creation of artificial intelligence.

Initially, the appraisers set a relatively low price for this lot, only 7-10 thousand dollars. However, the participants in the auction showed particular interest in this lot, and as a result, the painting created in 2018 was sold at a price of 432 thousand dollars, it turns out that the price during the auction increased 45 times from the initial value. Nobody expected to reach this amount during the auction.

The picture, which is created by artificial intelligence, cannot be confused with the works of artists. If the masters of painting usually put their own autographs on their works in the corner, then artificial intelligence indicates the algorithm that was used to create the picture. Developers of the painting's artificial intelligence system say the first piece is part of a series of portraits of the Belamy family, which is fictional. In total, this original series includes eleven portraits, all portraits of people invented by artificial intelligence itself.

It is worth noting that the already finished work of artificial intelligence faced opponents from among the artists. They believe that such paintings, which cannot be called works of art, should not be put up for auction. Despite this, the lot was still included in the trading program, and moreover, it was sold for a lot of money. The painting is a print on canvas. The size of the painting is relatively small and is only 70x70 centimeters.

Specialists from a team called Obvious worked on the development of an artificial intelligence capable of painting. This team includes programmers Gauthier Werner, Pierre Fotrel and Hugo Caselles-Dupre. Before the first painting was created by the algorithm, it reviewed and analyzed more than 15 thousand paintings created by masters of painting in the period from the 14th to the 20th century. In the work of writing portraits, two neural networks work at the same time. One such neural network comes up with an image, the second checks to prevent the creation of a copy of an existing work of art.