What was the first AI-generated artwork sold at a major auction, created by the Paris-based collective Obvious?

Portrait of Edmond de Belamy was the first AI-generated artwork sold at a major auction, created by the Paris-based collective Obvious.

Christie’s auctioned the work in New York in October 2018. It sold for US$432,500, far above the auction house’s initial estimate of $7,000 to $10,000. The portrait depicts a fictional member of the Belamy family and includes an unusual algorithmic signature at the lower right.

Obvious created the image with a generative adversarial network, or GAN. The system was trained on a dataset of historical portraits, with one neural network generating images and another judging whether they resembled examples from the training data.

The sale sparked debate about authorship, originality, copyright, and the role of the people who select data and configure algorithms. It is sometimes called the first AI artwork auctioned, but earlier computational art existed; the distinction concerns the prominence and commercial impact of this auction sale.