Aesthetically, particularly
there’s nothing special about 'EDMOND DE BELAMY’ . It appears to be just another fuzzy portrait from a bygone century. A signature in the bottom-right corner of the canvas, however, reveals it to be markedly contemporary. It is not the pen stroke of an artist but a line of code belonging to the algorithm that produced the work.
The ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE that created the work is credited to a Paris-based collective called OBVIOUS . But unlike art, attribution for code is less linear. The core of the AI that produced the portrait was actually built by another artist, ROBBIE BARRAT . It was published online a year before the auction, where anyone could access, apply, and modify it as they see fit. In the software world, this type of release, in which the copyright holder uploads their work to the public domain, In October 2018, 'Edmond De is called open B e l a m y ’ f e t c h e d $ 4 3 2 , 5 0 0 U S D at source.
Christie’s. It was billed as “the f i r s t p i e c e o f A I - g e n e r at e d a r t t o come to auction.”
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