# AI-generated portrait sells for a whopping $432,000 at auction A local text copy of a third-party source linked from The Most Famous Artist headline archive. Inclusion preserves historical coverage; it does not independently confirm the source’s claims or imply that every linked source explicitly names or credits the artist. Status: available — reviewed article text. Original source URL: Retrieved source URL: Source title: AI-generated portrait sells for a whopping $432,000 at auction Publication (archive label): Mashable Source author: Johnny Lieu Source publication date: 2018-10-26T07:38:14+00:00 Original archive label: An artwork created by artificial intelligence sold for 45 times more than estimated , Mashable, October 2018 Original archive date label: October 2018 Archive entry: https://www.themostfamousartist.com/#press-3699e674e931 Retrieved at: 2026-11-03T17:27:25+00:00 Body word count (whitespace-delimited): 276 Body SHA256: 98d3d97d2a181e5f112d59627c55144b7a7870f6e18e3a87e2b1ce47724ec031 Republished under rights confirmed by the site owner on 2026-11-03. Text formatting is simplified; images, video, and interactive elements are not reproduced. Historical archive date labels may differ from verified publisher metadata. ## Copy notes - Removed unrelated video/JavaScript and SEE ALSO link. Preserved the publisher’s conflicting auction price in title and body verbatim. ## Article text Well, here's another job artificial intelligence can do instead of humans.AI-generated artwork Portrait of Edmond Belamy sold for 45 times its anticipated price at Christie's, going under the hammer for an eye-watering $435,000 in New York. While the painting (of sorts) is done by computers, the project is actually the creation of Obvious, a Parisian collective consisting of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier.It's the first AI-created artwork that's gone to auction, and was created by an algorithm which uses thousands of portraits to create the image."The algorithm is composed of two parts," Caselles-Dupré explained in a statement online. "On one side is the Generator, on the other the Discriminator. We fed the system with a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th century to the 20th."The Generator makes a new image based on the set, then the Discriminator tries to spot the difference between a human-made image and one created by the Generator. The aim is to fool the Discriminator into thinking that the new images are real-life portraits. Then we have a result."While it resembles a portrait, there is slight distortion in its appearance, which is a result of the AI being not quite there when it comes to aesthetics."The Discriminator is looking for the features of the image — a face, shoulders — and for now it is more easily fooled than a human eye," Caselles-Dupré added.It's not the first time AI has been used to create art. Last year, Los Angeles artist Matty Mo used the technology to create portraits of factory workers, art dealers, pilots, artists, and taxi drivers, jobs that he believes will be replaced by machines.