AI-generated portrait sells for $432,500 at Christie’s

“Portrait of Edmond de Belamy,” made by the Paris collective Obvious with a generative adversarial network trained on about 15,000 historical portraits, sold at Christie’s in New York on 25 October 2018 for $432,500, roughly 43 times its high estimate.

Why it mattered It was the first work made with AI sold at a major auction house, and it moved the question of who authors such an image into the art market.