Christie's "Portait of Edmond Belamy" sale prompts authenticity controversy
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Occurred: October 2018
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A Christie's auction of the AI-generated Portrait of Edmond Belamy sparked debates about authorship, originality, and ethical practices in emerging AI art markets.
What happened
What happened
The Paris-based collective Obvious used a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) trained on 15,000 historical portraits to create the blurry, algorithmically generated image.
Despite its technical simplicity, the sale at Christie’s marked the first major auction of AI art, drawing intense media hype and resulting in the work's sale for USD 432,000. It had been estimated to sell for between USD 7,000 and USD 10,000.
Critics highlighted Obvious’ lack of transparency in crediting Robbie Barrat, a 19-year-old artist whose open-source code formed the basis of their work. The collective also faced backlash for marketing the piece as “created by AI” while downplaying human involvement, despite relying on Barrat’s pre-existing algorithms and datasets.
Why it happened
Why it happened
The controversy stemmed from Obvious’s strategic media narrative, which emphasised AI autonomy to generate novelty and market appeal.
Christie’s marketing amplified this framing, describing the work as “not the product of a human mind”. The collective later admitted losing control of the narrative, with co-founder Hugo Caselles-Dupré acknowledging misinformation and community backlash.
The absence of clear attribution standards for AI art further complicated claims of originality.
What it means
What it means
Obvious faced accusations of exploiting open-source contributions without credit, damaging their reputation within the AI art community.
The sale raised questions about intellectual property in collaborative AI systems and the ethics of anthropomorphising algorithms. It also highlighted how auction houses and media can skew public understanding of technological capabilities for commercial gain.
The incident underscored tensions between innovation and tradition in art, as well as the need for frameworks to address authorship and value in AI-generated works.
Operator:
Developer: Obvious Art
Country: USA
Sector: Media/entertainment/sports/arts
Purpose: Generate artwork
Technology: Generative adversarial network (GAN); Neural network; Deep learning; Machine learning
Issue: Anthropomorphism; Authenticity; Transparency
Research, advocacy 🧮
Research, advocacy 🧮
Ziv Epstein, Sydney Levine, David G. Rand, Iyad Rahwan. Who Gets Credit for AI-Generated Art? (pdf)
News, commentary, analysis 🗞️
News, commentary, analysis 🗞️
https://www.zdnet.com/article/peoples-notions-about-ai-are-terrible-an-mit-study-asks-whether-they-can-be-helped/
https://www.dezeen.com/2018/10/29/christies-ai-artwork-obvious-portrait-edmond-de-belamy-design/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/design/ai-art-sold-christies.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/christies-sells-ai-produced-art-half-million-dollars/story?id=58749667
https://hyperallergic.com/468060/christies-sells-ai-generated-art-for-432500-as-controversy-swirls-over-creators-use-of-copied-code/
https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/ai-generated-art-sells-for-nearly-half-a-million-dollars-at-christies/
https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/10/13/the-ai-art-at-christies-is-not-what-you-think
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-art-failing-grasp-christies-ai-portrait-coup
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=d1833743-90ae-47f7-98a1-82d76c3338a1
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Published: April 2025
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