Applications of AI

In New York City in October 2018, the international auction house Christie's sold the Portrait of Edmond Belamy (Figure 1.1) during the show Prints & Multiples for $432,500.00. This sale was remarkable both because the sale price was 45 times higher than the initial estimates for the piece, and due to the unusual origin of this portrait. Unlike the majority of other artworks sold by Christie's since the 18th century, the Portrait of Edmond Belamy is not painted using oil or watercolors, nor is its creator even human; rather, it is an entirely digital image produced by a sophisticated machine learning algorithm. The creators—a Paris-based collective named Obvious—used a collection of 15,000 portraits created between the 14^th and 20^th centuries to tune an artificial neural network model capable of generating aesthetically similar, albeit synthetic, images.

Figure 1.1: The Portrait of Edmond Belamy¹

Portraiture is far from...