A group of French AI engineers and artists recently wrote a “generative adversarial network” (GAN) which is capable of producing creepy-ass portraits, one particularly creepy portrait of which sold at auction for a staggering amount of money.
The piece in question is called Edmond de Belamy and is, in fact, part of a larger fictitious family created by the AI, all of which have their own terrifying, distorted portraits. Have a look at them below.
That’s some horror movie shit right there, folks. Edmond de Belamy was presumed to sell for no more than €10,000 but ended up raking in a huge $US432,500 ($610,186) from an anonymous bidder.
The team who created the AI, called Obvious, fed its GAN 15,000 portraits from the last 600 years, which it drew from to create its own pieces of art. While they’re all scary as hell, some are quite impressive in their take on painted portraits. You can see the full image of old mate Edmond below, which certainly looks the most authentic of the lot.
The thing was even signed by the AI. Well, kinda. Obvious used a section of the algorithm that created the image, which seems pretty fitting if you ask me. Both Obvious and various art holdings speculate that the piece, being one of the first created by an AI, is historically significant, which is why it sold for so much.
Of course, whether machines can create legitimate art is still a raging philosophical debate, but at least we now know that some of the works are worth money. That still doesn’t answer the question, but it’s a pretty interesting development either way.
