A portrait made by algorithm smashed new boundaries Thursday, selling for $432,500 (roughly Rs. 3.2 crores) and becoming the first piece of Artificial Intelligence art sold at a major auction house, Christie's said.
At first glance, "Edmond de Belamy," the portrait of a gentleman dressed in black and framed in gold, could be any standard portrait from the 18th or 19th century.
Up close, the image is more intriguing. The face is fuzzy and the picture seemingly unfinished. Instead of an artist's signature, it bears the stamp of a mathematical formula on the bottom right.
It's the brainchild of French collective Obvious, whose aim is to use artificial intelligence to democratise art. To make the painting, artist Pierre Fautrel ran 15,000 classic portraits through a computer software.
Once the software "understood the rules of portraiture," using a new algorithm developed by Google researcher Ian Goodfellow, it then generated a series of new images by itself, Fautrel said.
The French collective selected 11, calling them the "Belamy family," one of which on Thursday fetched $432,500 at Christie's in New York, the epicenter of the traditional art market.
The price smashed its pre-sale estimates of $7,000 to $10,000. Christie's said the work was snapped up by an anonymous telephone bidder after a five-way battle on the phone, online and one would-be buyer in the room.
But is it art? Fautrel, 25, insists that it is.
"Even if the algorithm creates the image," he told AFP "we are the people who decided to do this, who decided to print it on canvas, sign it as a mathematical formula, put it in a gold frame."