The Cellar Image of the Day

This portrait, titled “Edmond de Belamy”, was put up for auction at Christies New York.
This is a notable sale because the portrait was created by the French collective Obvious, using Artificial Intelligence.
Christies forecast $7,000 to $10,000 for the first AI generated piece sold by a major house, but it sold for $432,500.

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While the “is it art?” debate may rage, as it did once around photography, the sale brought AI-generated painting, sculpture and screen work into focus as the new artistic medium to collect. Rather than an autonomous being with its own creative impulses, or a tool for creativity, AI is itself the new medium – one shaped by human intervention. This is no artistic cul-de-sac; some of the biggest artists in the world are using AI in their work, leading galleries are giving it wall space – and early adopters are becoming pioneering collectors.

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The inclusion in the auction of the work, Edmond de Belamy, by French collective Obvious, was instigated by Richard Lloyd, international head of prints & multiples at Christie’s. “I was attracted by the fact that it looks – initially at least – to be the work of a ‘human’ artist. We thought it important that people’s first take on an AI artwork be without preconceptions,” he says, explaining that this way viewers could judge whether they liked it before they realised how it was created. The portrait was made by feeding a computer, or “deep neural network”, with 15,000 reference portraits. The AI was then trained to recognise what a portrait was and create its own using an algorithm. The result is a series called La Famille de Belamy, inkjet prints on canvas in gilded wood frames, signed with the formula of the algorithm used. The three remaining pieces are available to buy from Obvious.

But Obvious do not come from a visual-art background, something that has dismayed many artists working with AI, data, coding and algorithms. How these artists use AI to create works is immensely varied. There are AI-assisted paintings riffing on Yves Klein’s Anthropométries by experimental NYC multimedia artist Addie Wagenknecht (price on request) – in which she programs a robot with an algorithm to paint a canvas, but reclines nude in its pathway to obstruct it – while the multichannel installation by pioneering digital artist collective JODI (works from £4,500) trains a computer to play noughts and crosses. What unites them is a self-aware exploration and critical examination of AI, and its potential and limitations, and the fusion of human creativity with that of the machine or algorithm. In this it significantly differs from traditional technology-driven artworks.

This effort obviously has nothing to do with facial identification research.
If Edmond walked into the room, we would know him by his not having one.