If you’ve ever seen the film I, Robot, you may remember the scene in which Will Smith’s character asks the android Sonny if a robot could turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece, to which Sonny responded “can you?” A snappy reply, but it turns out he could’ve picked a more relevant one. Something along the lines of “yeah, an AI made a painting in 2018 and it sold for almost half a million dollars.”
French art collective Obvious debuted a series of painted portraits at Christie’s art house in New York City. One painting, titled “Portrait of Edmond Belamy,” sold at auction for $432,500, a major hike from the $7-10,000 it was projected to sell for. This painting, as well as the others presented by Obvious, were not created by human hands, but by a computer. The collective fed over 15,000 portraits created between the 14th and 20th centuries into a machine learning system. By compiling data on the portraits’ various quirks and similarities, the computer created its very own original compositions using the subsequent mathematical algorithm. There are some notable differences from a natural work, such as a blurry face on the subject, but for the most part, a casual art patron cannot tell the difference. In succinct terms, the computer created the perfect formula for emulating one style of art.
Rather than to themselves, Obvious has attributed each painting to the machine that created them by signing the bottoms with a part of the algorithm that was used.
