AI Artwork Auction

Submission 7,113

Part of a series on AI Art. [View Related Entries]

Overview

AI Artwork Auction refers to the sale of the painting "Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy," which was generated by Artificial Intelligence and sold at auction for $432,500. The sale led to a debate online as to who was responsible for the artwork, as the art collective Obvious produced the piece but used at least a modified version of the code created by another programmer to make it.

Background

On October 25th, 2018, an AI-generated painting titled "Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy," sold for $432,500 from auction house Christie's.^[1] The piece was was generated by French art collective Obvious.

Developments

Prior to the the painting being sold, programmer Robbie Barrat posted very similar artworks code he created generated, tweeting "Does anyone else care about this? Am I crazy for thinking that they really just used my network and are selling the results?"

Days prior to the auction, The Verge^[2] covered the auction and Barrat's claim to the code which created "Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy." The Verge explains the history of how AI-generated art was created and how Barrat generated and shared a code on GitHub to help other AI-artists create art. The Obvious collective used the code to create the painting which sold at Christie's. Speaking to The Verge, Hugo Caselles-Dupré, the tech lead for Obvious, admitted that Obvious used Barrat's code but tweaked it to fit the collective's taste. Other AI artists say in the piece that the work done in the "Belamy" painting was "probably 90 percent… done by [Barrat].”

After the painting sold, Obvious responded to criticisms by posting direct messages they shared with Barrat in which Barrat gave them permission to use the code (shown below).

Others came to Obvious' defense, as Barrat made the code open on GitHub, making legal routes for Barrat limited. Barrat iterated to Daily Dot^[3] that he did not want to take legal action against Obvious, saying "My main concern is just that actual artists working with AI get more recognition, and don’t get shadowed over by this collective of marketers and their recent sale."