Obvi­ous Art
Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy
2018

Three French stu­dents tweaked a GAN (Gen­er­a­tive Adver­sar­i­al Net­work) algo­rithm derived from open source to pro­duce an array of images. Then inkjet-print­ed to can­vas and auc­tioned off one for $432,500 to an anony­mous buy­er. I mean, talk about turn­ing water to wine—jeez Louise! The sto­ry behind this piece is all over the place. Being first at some­thing is still very much “a thing.”

left: the “AI gen­er­at­ed” por­trait Christie’s is auc­tion­ing off right now

right: out­puts from a neur­al net­work I trained and put online *over a year ago*.

Does any­one else care about this? Am I crazy for think­ing that they real­ly just used my net­work and are sell­ing the results? pic.twitter.com/wAdSOe7gwz

— Rob­bie Bar­rat (@videodrome) Octo­ber 25, 2018

• Christie’s: Lot 363
• The Verge: How three French stu­dents used bor­rowed code to put the first AI por­trait in Christie’s
• NY Times: Up for Bid, AI Art Signed ‘Algo­rithm’
• Obvi­ous Art

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