In October of 2018, Christie's sold the work Portrait of
Edmond de Belamy for $432,500. None of this, including the price,
would be notable if not for the claimed artist. The claimed artist
was not a person but an algorithm, bearing its creator's
signature:
Obvious, a Paris-based collective, created the work using what
is known as Generative Adversarial Networks, or "GANs."
Creating works using GANs requires inputting thousands of images as
well as developing and making adjustments to the algorithm.
The sale, which garnered attention and outrage alike, served as
a flashpoint in the discussion of artificial intelligence and art.
As Ian Bogost of The Atlantic wrote, "[t]he image was created
by an algorithm the artists didn't write, trained on an
'Old Masters' image set they also didn't
create."
