A portrait created by artificial intelligence(AI)made a historic appearance on the auction(拍卖)block at Christie's in New York City this week.It is the first artwork created by an algorithm(算法)to be offered for auction in the world of fine art.
The strange-looking painting of an imaginary man in a dark long dress left the auction block at Christie's for $432,500 on Oct.25 in New York City.
The portrait—designed in the"Old Master"style of European fine artists from centuries ago—only partially fills the canvas(画布),leaving empty space around the central figure.It appears to represent a man with an unclear face,dressed in clothing similar to that worn by subjects painted by the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn in the 17th century.
Of course,a computer didn't pick up a brush and become an artist.The AI that generated(生成)the image had human programmers—a Parisian art team called Obvious.To generate the portrait,titled"Portrait of Edmond De Belamy",the Obvious team first fed the neural network a diet of 15,000 images painted between the 14th and 20th centuries,to train it to recognize visual elements in fine art,Obvious artist Hugo Caselles—Dupré told Christie's.The algorithm that eventually created an original image had two parts that worked against each other,called the Generator and the Discriminator.
"The Generator makes a new image based on the set,and then the Discriminator tries 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.Then,we have a result,"he told Christie's.
GAN's final image was then inkjet—printed on canvas and framed,according to Obvious.At the bottom of the portrait is a mathematical formula(公式)representing the algorithm that created it,Obvious artists wrote on the team's website.
The goal of the painting and of Obvious,also co-founded by Hugo Caselles-Dupré and Gauthier Vernier,was to prove"artificial intelligence can do more than operate driverless cars or transform industry—it can be creative,"CNBC reported.