Who Needs Artists When You Have AI?

Later this month in New York, Christie’s will become the first auction house to sell a work created by artificial intelligence (AI). The 2018 painting, a hazy portrait of what appears to be a well-fed clergyman, possibly French, hailing from an indeterminate period in history, is expected to fetch between $7,000 and $10,000. His name, according to the work’s title, is Edmond Belamy. Even more curious is the signature scrawled on the bottom right of the canvas, which reads: min G max D 𝔼x [log (D(x))] + 𝔼z [log(1 – D (G(z)))], and refers to the algorithm, or generative adversarial network (GAN), that produced the work.

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