--- title: Painting Made by Artificial Intelligence Sells for $432,500 description: An artwork made by an artificial intelligence program sold at Christie's for $432,500, nearly 45 times its high estimate canonical: https://time.com/5435683/artificial-intelligence-painting-christies/ author: Casey Quackenbush article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-10-26T08:56:52.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T04:46:13.598Z og:title: Painting Made by Artificial Intelligence Sells for $432,500 og:description: It's the first piece of AI art to go under the hammer at a major auction house og:url: https://time.com/5435683/artificial-intelligence-painting-christies/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte84f328824241d10/69893d897cdbac43b4d5e446/gettyimages-1052751430.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 5250 og:image:height: 2953 og:image:alt: US-ENTERTAINMENT-ART-ALGORITHM og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Painting Made by Artificial Intelligence Sells for $432,500 twitter:description: It's the first piece of AI art to go under the hammer at a major auction house twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte84f328824241d10/69893d897cdbac43b4d5e446/gettyimages-1052751430.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # A Painting Made by Artificial Intelligence Has Been Sold at Auction for $432,500 > Sponsored content. 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The Brief is available free at time.com/newsletters, where readers can select it along with any of TIME's other six newsletters. There is no subscription required to receive it. #### Is The Brief free? Yes. The Brief is a free daily email newsletter from TIME. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes The Brief? The Brief is led by editor Richard Hall and draws on reporting from TIME's newsroom. Every edition is assembled by TIME editors rather than generated automatically. by [Casey Quackenbush](https://time.com/author/casey-quackenbush/) ## Casey Quackenbush Oct 26, 2018 8:56 AM UTC  A woman looks at a work of art created by an algorithm by French collective named OBVIOUS which produces art using artificial intelligence, titled "Portrait of Edmond de Belamy" (estimate: $7,000-10,000) at Christies in New York on Oct. 22, 2018. A woman looks at a work of art created by an algorithm by French collective named OBVIOUS which produces art using artificial intelligence, titled "Portrait of Edmond de Belamy" (estimate: $7,000-10,000) at Christies in New York on Oct. 22, 2018.Timothy A. Clary— AFP/Getty Images by [Casey Quackenbush](https://time.com/author/casey-quackenbush/) ## Casey Quackenbush Oct 26, 2018 8:56 AM UTC An artwork made by an artificial intelligence program [sold at a Christie’s auction](https://www.christies.com/features/A-collaboration-between-two-artists-one-human-one-a-machine-9332-1.aspx?sc%5Flang=en) for $432,500, nearly 45 times its high estimate. _Portrait of Edmond Belamy,_ a painting created by a Paris-based [art collective called Obvious](http://time.com/5357221/obvious-artificial-intelligence-art/), was generated by using an algorithm and a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th and 20th centuries. It [sold](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45980863) during the October 23-25 _Prints & Multiples_ sale at Christie’s, making it the first piece of AI art to go under the hammer at a major auction house, Christie’s said. The art collective comprises of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier, and uses a method called GAN — an acronym for generative adversarial network — to explore the intersection of art and artificial intelligence. In place of a signature, the blurry portrait is signed with the equation used to generate the painting. The process involved feeding the algorithm a set of paintings, and having it generate an image based on the difference between its own work and the original.  A section of the artwork "Portrait of Edmond de Belamy," created by an algorithm by French collective named OBVIOUS, at Christies in New York on Oct. 22, 2018. Timothy A. Clary—AFP/Getty Images “We did some work with nudes and landscapes, and we also tried feeding the algorithm sets of works by famous painters. But we found that portraits provided the best way to illustrate our point, which is that algorithms are able to emulate creativity,” said Hugo Caselles-Dupré of Obvious. The portrait has drawn a significant amount of media attention with some speculating about what artificial intelligence means for the future of art. “AI is just one of several technologies that will have an impact on the art market of the future – although it is far too early to predict what those changes might be,” said Christie’s specialist Richard Lloyd. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5435683/artificial-intelligence-painting-christies/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5435683/artificial-intelligence-painting-christies/"},"headline":"A Painting Made by Artificial Intelligence Has Been Sold at Auction for $432,500","datePublished":"2018-10-26T08:56:52.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T04:46:13.598Z","description":"It's the first piece of AI art to go under the hammer at a major auction house","url":"https://time.com/5435683/artificial-intelligence-painting-christies/","keywords":["Newsfeed","Fine Art","onetime","overnight"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte84f328824241d10/69893d897cdbac43b4d5e446/gettyimages-1052751430.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Casey Quackenbush","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/casey-quackenbush/"}],"articleSection":"","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte84f328824241d10/69893d897cdbac43b4d5e446/gettyimages-1052751430.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"US-ENTERTAINMENT-ART-ALGORITHM","caption":"US-ENTERTAINMENT-ART-ALGORITHM","creditText":"Timothy A. 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