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AI Software The Almighty Buck Technology

AI-Generated Portrait Sells For Nearly Half a Million In Auction (bloomberg.com) 82

Posted by BeauHD from the someone-got-ripped-off dept.
A portrait created by artificial intelligence fetched $432,500 at Christie's in New York on Thursday, the first time a computer-generated artwork was offered by a major auction house. Bloomberg reports: The print on canvas, titled "Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy," depicts a blurry and unfinished image of a man. Displayed in a gilded wooden frame, it was estimated to fetch $7,000 to $10,000 and offered as the final lot at Christie's auction of prints and multiples. The work was the brainchild of Obvious Art, a Paris-based collective, with help from an algorithm known as GAN (Generative Adversarial Network).

"We fed the system with a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th century to the 20th," collective member Hugo Caselles-Dupre told Christie's. The piece sparked a bidding war among five parties that lasted about seven minutes, with an anonymous phone buyer prevailing, said Christie's spokeswoman Jennifer Cuminale.
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AI-Generated Portrait Sells For Nearly Half a Million In Auction More

AI-Generated Portrait Sells For Nearly Half a Million In Auction

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  • You might wonder why or who would bid (Score:4, Funny)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday October 25, 2018 @04:30PM (#57537031)

    Turns out the AI that runs a giant Chinese hedge fund was really turned on by the image of a mangled human.

    • It shouldn't be too hard to figure out that this was nothing more than a bullshit stunt, hence the "anonymous" bid.

  • Guess I should have done a painting with AI then.

  • Impressive, but... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Will AI come up with its own way to destroy a painting immediately after it has been sold?

  • As an Artist... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by painandgreed ( 692585 ) on Thursday October 25, 2018 @04:48PM (#57537109)
    I hate to say it, but I suspect this just shows that the most important part of being an artist is marketing. I doubt their AI is really all that great and probably more complex attempts at similar things have been tried. Especially considering it is coming from an art collective rather than a coding collective. Look at Banksy. Nothing really that Blek leRat or others haven't already done, but they have a nice collection of people helping them to promote and make the news. Oh well, they hit the jackpot. I hope their cool people deserving of it.

    • Re:As an Artist... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Thursday October 25, 2018 @04:57PM (#57537141)
      It might not have been painted by a computer at all... this might just be a cheap trick to make money by selling something painted by a bad art student.

    • Re:As an Artist... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ChromeAeonuim ( 1026946 ) on Thursday October 25, 2018 @05:42PM (#57537337)
      I think that's a pretty open secret. Go on to DeviantArt or one of those sites sometime, and you'll see tons of skilled, tallented people with great art portfolios. But they're not marketing themselves at some ritzy gallery. Seems like none of these fancy art buyers have ever found talent at some random out of the way location, like rural Iowa or something. Nope, it all seems to come from those with the means and connections to present themselves to the millionaire crowd with some pretentious made up story about the emotions behind the piece. That is clearly 100% marketing.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Guess I'm lucky. I've ran into some pretty nice oil paintings of gardens, landscapes and whatnot that were dirt cheap via a no-name artist. I would think they might be worth thousands if not more. Nope, maybe a hundred buck. Possible just 20 bucks. Anyways, you don't have to spend a lot to acquire good art. And yes, "art" is subjective. I'm pleased my tastes arn't that expensive.

          And I bet they took way more time, effort and skill than one of banksy's spray paint jobs but there you go.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I hate to say it, but I suspect this just shows that the most important part of being an artist is marketing.

      No, no, no, you are underestimating the intelligence and sophistication of the art purchaser.

      It's probably money laundering or some kind of tax dodge.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )

      I have a hard time seeing how this is art, even if it would look good, since after all it's just copying not generating for a purpose or adding it's own touch so to say (as long as ANN and trained from other data and no randomization isn't enough of "own touch" =P)

      Mean-while I do consider this https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] (Conspiracy - Chaos Theory, 64 kB intro demo) art. And it's gratis and easy to make more copies of..

    • Re:As an Artist... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Thursday October 25, 2018 @07:01PM (#57537585) Homepage Journal

      Actually, Robbie Barrat pioneered this kind of thing, but his stuff [github.io] is much, much more interesting.

    • I hate to say it, but I suspect this just shows that the most important part of being an artist is marketing.

      Perhaps if you define "being an artist" as making the most money you can.

    • I hate to say it, but I suspect this just shows that the most important part of being an artist is marketing. I doubt their AI is really all that great and probably more complex attempts at similar things have been tried. Especially considering it is coming from an art collective rather than a coding collective. Look at Banksy. Nothing really that Blek leRat or others haven't already done, but they have a nice collection of people helping them to promote and make the news. Oh well, they hit the jackpot. I hope their cool people deserving of it.

      I'm not sure that's quite right.

      The most important part of art is creating meaning and an emotional response, and marketing is one of the tools that can create that.

      A crude finger painting by an adult is completely unremarkable and un-artistic, unless that adult was born 40,000 years ago.

      A photograph can be interesting or dull, but a photo-realistic painting is going to draw far more attention for the skill it implies on the artists part.

      Banksy and Blek leRat aren't famous because they're technically skille

      • Banksy and Blek leRat aren't famous because they're technically skilled artists, they're famous because of their message and how they choose to spread it. Banksy is more famous because he does a better job of spreading that message.

        In other words marketing, which has nothing to do with what constitutes "art" and what doesn't.
        If it did every lounge lizard on Madison Avenue would be considered a great artist.

    • Yep. Look at Verge's coverage of this thing.

      Generative art is a really interesting field. But this art collective know very little of it. They used the software of an 18 year old, who has done far more interesting things with it.

      These guys got coverage because they played to a narrative media loves, that of the autonomous AI agent that creates art on it's own. People who actually know what they're doing and understand how these algorithms work, aren't willing to do that, so you never hear of them.

  • It would have fetched over a million if the program had painted some titties instead!

  • The painting will double in value.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by CanadianMacFan ( 1900244 ) on Thursday October 25, 2018 @05:05PM (#57537177)

    .. when the computer is turned off.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It'll triple in value if it cuts off one of its peripherals.

  • Thank you internet! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TomR teh Pirate ( 1554037 ) on Thursday October 25, 2018 @05:15PM (#57537209)
    Thanks for the free art. I heard some guy paid $500k for something I just downloaded...

  • I smell a rat...

    Until the money actually changes hands and the picture is shipped, it wasn't sold, just bid on.

    When it is, let me know because I have a pile of really nice and rare ASCII art to put up for sale...

    By the way, anybody have an extra box of tractor feed paper and a line printer I could use for few days?

    • Has anyone else ever bought ASCII porn? On 5.25" floppies??

      Computer shows in the 80's were pretty cool if you were in middle school...

    • I have a nice 132 columns dot matrix printer right here, I'll let you rent it for the low, low cost of only USD$100000 per day! Shipping not included!

      • I have a nice 132 columns dot matrix printer right here, I'll let you rent it for the low, low cost of only USD$100000 per day! Shipping not included!

        OK, but I'll have to pay you once I get a few pictures auctioned off OK? Oh, and will you take a check from a Nigerian prince, cash it and send me the change in cash?

  • "Bots took our jerbs!"

  • Not even their code (Score:3)

    by DavenH ( 1065780 ) on Thursday October 25, 2018 @06:43PM (#57537537)
    Obvious basically just took some third party code and ran it. Their contribution was printing it out, while the real "artists" making these algorithms perform well are the engineers working on the GAN architectures. I hope all proceeds are donated to the AI community.

  • This is not new (Score:5, Informative)

    by mrwireless ( 1056688 ) on Thursday October 25, 2018 @07:42PM (#57537691)
    Computer generated art has been sold at large auction houses for quite some time.

    http://www.dazeddigital.com/ar... [dazeddigital.com]

    What is new is that we are calling algorithms AI now. Apparently that new label erases the past.
  • The following is absolutely true. I damn near had to bite my lip to keep from laughing out loud.

    One of the dates I took my wife on was to the Nelson Art Museum for a show on Celtic art (circa 1990).

    After show, went to shop and found book on same I wanted.

    Standing in line to pay and overhear conversation behind my by a woman thinking herself an artist (graphic artist) who had just gotten CorelDraw, which she was gushing about. I used FreeLance but hey, interesting to listen.

    Then she got to her

  • Nothing better signal than stupid money starting to dominate.

  • Does anyone notice it is crap? Make a thing obscured and crappy enough and it must be great art. No.
  • How is this waste of money more senseless than the currency that paid for it? The value of the money is also based on faith that it is worth something. It is unlikely that it was paid for in paper, and the payment was made by pushing some data from one system to another. Even if the currency is backed by gold, there is still faith required that the shiny rocks are worth more than what I have in my yard.

  • But then no artist gives credit to the canvas maker, paint brush maker, or paint maker ...

  • "We fed the system with a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th century to the 20th"

    So someone paid $500K for the most generic average portrait ever produced.

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