The Painter Behind These Artworks Is an AI Program. Do They Still Count as Art?

Featured on time.com

Hanging inside a gold frame on a pristine white wall in Christie’s Central London Gallery is a dark, moody portrait of a man in Puritan-style black clothes—the work, it seems, of some Old Master. But scrawled in the bottom right corner, there’s an unexpected signature: a mathematical equation.

This is Edmond de Belamy by French art collective Obvious—or, more accurately, by an algorithm designed by Obvious.

“The whole process is about humans having as little input as possible in the finished piece,” says Gauthier Vernier, one of three 25 year-old French men who started Obvious in April 2017 out of their apartment in Paris. Since then, by teaching a computer about art history and showing it how to make its own work, Obvious have produced 11 artworks with the help of artificial intelligence.

The team’s motto is “Creativity isn’t just for humans.” Now, they’re starting to convince the art world that they’re right. In February, Obvious sold its first piece, Le Comte de Belamy to Paris-based collector Nicolas Laugero-Lasserre for €10,000 ($11,430). In October they’re auctioning Edmond at Christie’s in New York, the first auction of an AI-generated work at a major auction house.

Richard Lloyd, head of International Head of Prints and Multiples at Christies, arranged the auction and believes it will lay bare fundamental questions about art and creativity. “Everybody has their own definition of a work of art,” he says. “I’ve tended to think human authorship was quite important—that link with someone on the other side. But you could also say art is in the eye of the beholder. If people find it emotionally charged and inspiring then it is. If it waddles and it quacks, it’s a duck.”

There’s a whole Belamy family, including Le Comte, La Comtesse, Le Baron and La Baronne de Belamy—all slightly trippy, swirling portraits that look like they’re from the 18th century. To make them, Obvious used Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a kind of algorithm first created in 2014 by Ian Goodfellow, an American AI researcher, now based in San Francisco, who published his idea in an influential paper he wrote while at the University of Montreal. (Obvious named their first works Belamy, a rough translation of Goodfellow, in tribute to him.) First, the Obvious team needed to code the networks to fit their own criteria. “It’s like building a bike—if you forget a part, it’s not going to work,” says Hugo Caselles-Dupré, a PhD student of AI who is responsible for much of the tech side of Obvious’ work.

Click here to read the full article.