Auction house Christie’s has sold its first AI art piece for a staggering $432,500. This print was actually expected to fetch around $10,000 so it has certainly exceeded the expectations of this 252-year-old auctioneering juggernaut and those who were watching this auction closely. This is also the first time that Christie’s has sold an AI art piece.
A collective formed by three French students called Obvious is behind this piece of art. They used a generative adversarial network (GAN), a kind of machine learning algorithm, to develop this picture. The AI was trained on a dataset of historical portraits and it then tried to create one on its own. The image was created by the AI, Obvious just printed it, framed it, and signed it with part of the GAN’s algorithm.
“We are grateful to Christie’s for opening up this dialogue in the art community and honored to have been a part of this global conversation about the impact of this new technology in the creation of art,” Obvious said in a statement.
Christie’s has also confirmed the sale price of nearly half a million dollars to The Verge and added that the buyer wished to remain anonymous. The bidding battle took place on the phones and through ChristiesLive.
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