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How much is the first piece of AI art worth?

Answer: $432,000.

The first piece of art created entirely by AI sold at a major art auction for way more than anyone anticipated. In fact, its six-figure bid blew the $7,000-$10,000 expected sales price right out of the water. The bidder, who remains anonymous, bought the piece from the renowned Christie’s Prints and Multiples art auction in New York earlier this week.

The painting, titled Portrait of Edmond Belamy, was created by a Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm. Obvious art collective in Paris created the algorithm, training it on 15,000 portraits from between the 14th and 20th centuries. The algorithm comprises two major components, the Generator and the Discriminator. The former generates its own art based on what it has been exposed to, while the Discriminator compares those works to human-made pieces. When it could no longer tell the pieces apart, the Generator’s work was ready to sell.

Parisian art collective Obvious created this "Portrait of Edmond De Belamy" using #AI.https://t.co/ues3PQUuoV @engadget @obv_ious #tech #art pic.twitter.com/6Y0LmcWJJ4 — Madaline Zannes (@zanneslaw) October 26, 2018
Kate is a senior copy editor in Northern California. She holds a bachelor's degree in English with a minor in professional writing from the University of California, Davis.