An artificial intelligence designed artwork has sold for 45 times over its estimate at a Christie's auction in New York on Thursday.
The piece, called "Portrait of Edmond Belamy", is the first AI-designed artwork sold at a major auction house and went for $610,000.
Christie's, the auction house that has sold paintings by Picasso and Monet at record prices, sold the AI-generated portrait depicting a slightly blurry, chubby man in a dark frock-coat and white collar.
His off-centre 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 organiser Richard Lloyd in a statement.
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 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.
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