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The AI-generated "Portrait of Edmond Belamy"
depicts a slightly blurry chubby man in a dark frock-coat and
white collar, and his off-center position leaves enough white
space to show the artist's signature as "min max Ex[log(D(x))] +
Ez[log(1-D(G(z)))].
While the auction of machine-designed art is a first, some see
the sale as yet another work of portraiture on the Christie's
auction block.
"It may not have been painted by a man in a powdered wig, but it
is exactly the kind of artwork we have been selling for 250
years," said Christie's sale organizer Richard Lloyd in a
statement.
The portrait offered by Christie's for sale in New York from
Oct. 23 to 25 was created with AI programmed by the Paris-based
collective Obvious, whose members include Hugo Caselles-Dupré,
Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier. The work is estimated to
fetch $7,000 to $10,000, according to the auction house.
The artwork was produced as an experiment "in the interface
between art and artificial intelligence," Christie's said on its
website. It was among several portraits produced by AI, all of
them arranged in a fictitious Belamy family tree, including
Baron de Belamy in a military sash and a countess in pink silks.
The AI method is called 'generative adversarial network' or GAN,
and involves a two-part algorithm. Caselles-Dupré, quoted on the
website, said the two parts are the Generator and the
Discriminator.
First, a set of 15,0000 portraits painted between the 14th and
20th Centuries was fed into a computer. Then the Generator made
a new image based on that set, and the Discriminator tried to
spot the difference between a human-made image and one created
by the Generator.
"The aim is to fool the Discriminator into thinking that the new
images are real-life portraits," Caselles-Dupré said.
(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg; editing by Diane Craft)
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