The picture was created using nothing else but a machine learning algorithm that simply scanned historical artwork! As easy as it is but so exciting thinking of potential future opportunities for using AI inART 😀
AI art, yes, it’s gonna be common kind of art sooner than we think. Similarly to oil, canvas painting it seems to be another way of making art and it’s extremely interesting from technical point of view. Will artist no longer be only manually talented person? Will IT nerd be another art maker in the near future? Looking forward to get to know how the art market will be disrupted by new technologies! Artificial Intelligence is now finding its place in art industry and I guess it will stay for good. Recently, Christie’s has sold its first piece of AI art. The canvas is named ‘Portrait of Edmond Belamy’ and it’s been sold for $432,500. Can you imagine what was the surprise when the price reached more than 400k while the expected price for the print was estimated between $7,000 and $10,000!
The artwork was created by Obvious. The three members of Obvious, three friends, 25-year-old French students, used a type of machine learning algorithm (known as a GAN -generative adversarial network) to create this outstanding picture. The network was trained on a dataset of historical portraits, and then it tried to create one of its own. They printed the image, framed it, and signed it with part of the GAN’s algorithm.
However it’s not the end of the story, it’s a little more interesting and has some controversy behind. The Verge reported that the Belamy print was actually not entirely created by Obvious from scratch. They admitted that they used part of the code from another AI artist, 19-year-old Robbie Barrat, so it’s not so clear how much was borrowed. Theoretically, Barrat could make a claim for ownership of the Belamy as his code was shared under an open-source license.Irrespectively, how the story is gonna end, the AI art pieces will be coming to the market since now more and more frequently.
