Humans are becoming more and more redundant thanks to advancements in AI.

Now it’s even taking over the art world. The first ever painting produced by artificial intelligence sold for a whopping $432 500 (nearly R6,3 million) at Christie’s. That’s 43 times more than the estimated price before the auction.

The painting is a slightly blurry depiction of a European man named Edmond De Belamy. The last time an AI portrait of a Belamy family member was put up for auction, it sold for a third of the price of its digitally generated descendent.

The AI print is “painted” in the old Dutch style, and sold to an anonymous bidder who won the print after “a battle between three phone bidders, an online participant in France and one gentleman in the room”, reports ABC News.

The Old Masters-like portrait, a blurry face of a European man of indistinct origin, is the brainchild of the Paris-based Obvious Collective — and an algorithm.

Obvious is a trio of 25-year old friends who live and work together. One of the members, Hugo Caselles-Dupré, discovered the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) class of algorithms while working on his Ph.D. in machine learning.

After the astonishing sale, Obvious released a statement: ““We would like to thank the A.I. community, especially to those who have been pioneering the use of this new technology, including Ian Goodfellow, the creator of the GAN algorithm, who inspired the name of the Famille de Belamy series, and artist Robbie Barrat.”

Collective member Pierre Fautrel (below) had the following to say about the process:

“We are really fascinated by the power of algorithms. We begin to discuss, if you create art like this, is this art?” Fautrel said.

Obvious used the GAN algorithm — who “signed” the portrait — to create portraits of the 11-person Belamy family. Edmond was created by inputting 15,000 portraits scanning the 14th to the 20th centuries through the algorithms.

The question of what is and isn’t art has been doing the rounds since the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ first became a thing.

If you’d like to own a piece of AI art, two more Belamy portraits are spoken for, but the rest are still for sale on the Obvious website.

On the plus side, the removal of the human element means that you know that your painting won’t shred itself just to stay relevant.

Or you could just write your own algorithm. It’s easier than learning to draw.

[source:abcnews]