Christie's to auction an artwork made by artificial intelligence for the first time

Auction house Christie’s is set to put an artwork made using Artificial Intelligence under the hammer for the first time.

The print, which is entitled Portrait of Edmond Belamy, 2018, is a work created by French artist collective Obvious. Its sale will be the first time a work made using AI will go on sale at a major auction house.

The group of artists made the picture using GAN technology (or General Adversarial Network), which was presented a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th and 20th centuries, before creating its own.

The portrait is one of a set of made of the fictional Belamy family using this process. While the artwork looks strikingly like a 17th century painting, the face of the depicted figure is significantly distorted.

The work is set to go on sale today at the Prints & Multiples sale at Christie’s in New York from October 23-25, and is estimated to sell for between $7,000 and $10,000.

For more information, visit christies.com