Which AI-generated portrait sold for $432,500 at a 2018 Christie’s auction?

The AI-generated portrait Portrait of Edmond de Belamy sold for $432,500 at a 2018 Christie’s auction.

The work was created by the Paris-based art collective Obvious using a generative adversarial network, or GAN. Its subject is a fictional member of the Belamy family, and the blurred, incomplete appearance deliberately resembles historical European portraiture.

The sale attracted worldwide attention because Christie’s described it as the first artwork created by an AI algorithm to be offered by a major auction house. The final price greatly exceeded the presale estimate of $7,000 to $10,000.

A common mix-up is attributing the work to a single autonomous machine. Obvious used a system trained on a dataset of more than 15,000 portraits, while the collective selected the concept, prepared the output, and arranged the auction. The title refers to the fictional sitter, not to a real historical person.