AI-produced painting to be sold at prestigious London auction house

Despite early promise, Open AI's algorithm-driven bots fell to human Dota 2 players at The International 2018. Nevertheless, huge strides were made in advancing artificial intelligence to match human capability. In a similar vein, an AI-produced piece of art will now be sold at prestigious London auction house Christie's.

As reported by the BBC, the AI was designed by the French art collective Obvious—whose system compares its own portraits to those created by humans. In turn, the AI iterates and reiterates on its work until it is unable to tell the difference between it and its source material.

The BBC says the portrait—named Edmond de Belamy—marks the first time a piece of AI-produced artwork has been sold at a major auction house.

"One of the most important aspects of cuisine is to have great ingredients," says Hugo Caselles-Dupre, a member of Obvious. "So I guess for what we do—feeding data to algorithms, the quality of the data is crucial. If we see in the output something that speaks to us, we believe that it will speak to other people too."

I suppose the question is: how much would you pay for an AI-produced piece of art? We'll update once Edmond de Belamy goes on sale later this week.