Edmond de Belamy
| Edmond de Belamy | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Obvious (collective) |
| Medium | Ink |
| Subject | Male portrait |
| Dimensions | 70 cm × 70 cm (27.5 in × 27.5 in) |
Edmond de Belamy is a generative adversarial network (GAN) portrait painting constructed in 2018 by Paris-based arts collective Obvious.[1] Printed on canvas, the work belongs to a series of generative images called La Famille de Belamy. The name Belamy is a tribute to Ian Goodfellow, inventor of GANs. In French, "bel ami" means "good friend", a translated pun on Goodfellow.[2]
Auction[edit]
It gained media attention after Christie's announced its intention to auction the piece as the first artwork created using artificial intelligence to be featured in a Christie's Images New York auction.
Six minutes into bidding, it went up to US$350,000.[3] After the bidding, it surpassed pre-auction estimates, which valued it at US$7,000 to US$10,000; it sold for US$432,500 on 25 October 2018 instead,[4][5] making it the second most expensive artwork in the auction, just cheaper than Andy Warhol’s artwork, the 254 cm × 254 cm 1981 artwork that was sold for US$780,500, Myths.[3][6]
Method[edit]
Obvious's members are Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier. Caselles-Dupré stated that the algorithm used a "discriminator".[3] The image was created by an algorithm that was trained on a set of 15,000 portraits from the online art encyclopedia WikiArt, spanning the 14th to the 19th centuries.[7]
It is manually signed at the bottom-right with , which is part of the algorithm code that produced it.
![{\displaystyle \min _{\mathcal {G}}\max _{\mathcal {D}}E_{x}\left[\log({\mathcal {D}}(x))\right]+E_{z}\left[\log(1-{\mathcal {D}}({\mathcal {G}}(z)))\right]}](https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/9ebbb99da78d27f86a0e1ac8031cda8582ee54d8)
Description[edit]
The piece is a portrait of a somewhat blurry man. It is a print on canvas measuring 27 1⁄2 × 27 1⁄2 in (70 cm × 70 cm) set within a gilded wood frame.
Reception[edit]
The piece has been criticized because it was created using a generative adversarial network (GAN) software package based on prior research by others and implemented by Robbie Barrat, an AI artist who was not affiliated with Obvious, leading to allegations that Obvious contributed minimally to the final work product. Posts on the project's issue tracker show Obvious members requesting that Barrat provide support and custom features.[2]
The piece has also been criticized for whether it is real "art" or not.[8] Art critic Jonathan Jones did not acknowledge Edmond de Belamy as art.[9]
The piece has been placed within a tradition of works calling into question the basis of the modern art market, and highlighting the comic aspects of technology.[10] Research has used Edmond de Belamy to show how anthropomorphizing AI can affect allocations of responsibility and credit to artists.[11][12]
References[edit]
- ^ Alleyne, Allyssia (25 October 2018). "AI-produced artwork sells for $433K, smashing expectations". CNN. Archived from the original on 27 January 2024. Retrieved 26 May 2024.
- ^ a b Vincent, James (23 October 2018). "How three French students used borrowed code to put the first AI portrait in Christie's". The Verge. Archived from the original on 4 March 2024. Retrieved 17 November 2018.
- ^ a b c Kinsella, Eileen (25 October 2018). "The First AI-Generated Portrait Ever Sold at Auction Shatters Expectations, Fetching $432,500—43 Times Its Estimate". Artnet News. Archived from the original on 17 March 2024. Retrieved 26 May 2024.
- ^ "Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy". Christie's. Live Auction 16388. Archived from the original on 7 July 2023. Retrieved 29 October 2018.
- ^ Cohn, Gabe (25 October 2018). "AI Art at Christie's Sells for $432,500". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 16 May 2024. Retrieved 26 May 2024.
- ^ "Andy Warhol | Myths". Whitney Museum of American Art. P.2010.340. Archived from the original on 5 December 2023. Retrieved 26 May 2024.
- ^ Nugent, Ciara (20 August 2018). "How an Art Collective is Using Artificial Intelligence to Make Paintings". Time. Archived from the original on 20 March 2023.
- ^ Jones, Jonathan (26 October 2018). "A portrait created by AI just sold for $432,000. But is it really art?". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 20 January 2024. Retrieved 26 May 2024.
- ^ Hicks, Olivia (1 March 2019). "ART-ificial Intelligence: The Curious Case of Edmond De Belamy – The Isis". The Isis Magazine. Archived from the original on 2 March 2024. Retrieved 26 May 2024.
- ^ Rolez, Anaïs (6 December 2018). "The Mechanical Art of Laughter". Arts. 8 (1). Nantes, France: MDPI (published 21 December 2018): 2. doi:10.3390/arts8010002. ISSN 2076-0752.
- ^ Epstein, Ziv; Levine, Sydney; Rand, David G.; Rahwan, Iyad (25 September 2020). "Who Gets Credit for AI-Generated Art?". iScience. 23 (9). National Library of Medicine: 101515. Bibcode:2020iSci...23j1515E. doi:10.1016/j.isci.2020.101515. PMC 7492988. PMID 32920489.
- ^ Ray, Tiernan (18 September 2020). "People's notions about AI are terrible, an MIT study asks whether they can be helped". ZDNet. Archived from the original on 4 October 2023. Retrieved 21 September 2020.