
Christie’s sells its first AI portrait for $432k - monkeydust
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18023266/ai-art-portrait-christies-obvious-sold
======
dang
The main article on this is [https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/23/18013190/ai-
art-portrait...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/23/18013190/ai-art-portrait-
auction-christies-belamy-obvious-robbie-barrat-gans), which predates the
auction.

We changed the above url from
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45980863](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45980863)
to one that has a bit more info.

------
OisinMoran
Twitter thread from the author of the original algorithm:
[https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073](https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073)
(worth reading the whole thread, the art collective reply)

GitHub link: [https://github.com/robbiebarrat/art-
dcgan](https://github.com/robbiebarrat/art-dcgan) The README was last edited 6
months ago and contains the bolded text: "When using any outputs of the
models, credit me. Don't sell the outputs of the pre-trained models, modified
or not. If you have any questions email me before doing anything."

~~~
blotter_paper
I feel like this screencap posted by Obvious was the most illuminating part of
that twitstorm:
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqVdWJSW4AAOtXD?format=jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqVdWJSW4AAOtXD?format=jpg)

~~~
spongepoc
If Obvious hadn't been successful with their goals, Robbie would not (and did
not) care a bit that his work was being used. It only became contentious when
they were able to raise a lot of money. It's funny.

~~~
ablation
Well, obviously. Robbie said in his Github readme: "When using any outputs of
the models, credit me. Don't sell the outputs of the pre-trained models,
modified or not. If you have any questions email me before doing anything."

~~~
algorias
I feel for the guy, but keep in mind: just putting some text in your readme
does not create a legally binding contract.

------
erwan
I have sympathy for the author's frustration but they open-sourced their work
under a very permissive license.

It sounds comical that suddenly something becomes valuable because you hang it
in a gold frame, make minor modifications to it and ascribe it some symbolism.
But that is exactly how contemporary artworks are done.

If you go to exhibits and auctions, it is not uncommon to see highly valued
work that requires little sophistication to produce. The days you would woo
the art world by technical mastery alone are (mostly) over. This story fits in
the greater trend and there might be a bit of a culture clash.

I'm inclined to think that the general public underestimate contemporary art
and the art world overestimate its superiority over the more conventional
works. Whether it is for better or worse, I will leave you judge of that.

~~~
creddit
> I'm inclined to think that the general public underestimate contemporary art
> and the art world overestimate its superiority over the more conventional
> works.

I really like your framing of this and agree wholeheartedly. I think it really
comes from contemporary art’s focus on abstraction and meaning within context.
The combination of focus on abstraction and meaning while requiring the viewer
to understand the context in which a work was made makes it very inaccessible
to all but those who have the time and knowledge to develop that understanding
from. This makes it very inaccessible to general audiences. Alternatively, so
often the depth of the meaning/context and the effectiveness of the
abstraction are quite underwhelming in reality but overly celebrated by the
art world.

~~~
newswriter99
I disagree.

If you spent two minutes rolling some white paint on a white canvas because
your "abstract message" was about the void of space, it's not profound, you're
being an ass.

Conversely if you spent at least five hours stippling black spots on a white
canvas in the image of some obscure shape, because you had a concept in your
head, and it took a considerable amount of effort, THAT is a profound piece of
work.

The art world isn't full of bohemians with time and knowledge who've developed
understanding of abstractness. It's full of pretentious, bored, rich people.
Huge difference.

~~~
2bitencryption
> if you spent at least five hours ... and it took a considerable amount of
> effort, THAT is a profound piece of work.

Got it. work >= 5hrs == TRUE REAL PROFOUND ART, work < 5hrs == UTTER GARBAGE
PRETENTIOUS BULLSHIT.

Art is purely expression. It doesn't matter how long it takes you to express
what you're expressing. Pollock may have just splattered painting on a canvas.
But it was still a true _expression_. John Cage made a composition where the
orchestra doesn't play any notes. But it's still an _expression_.

~~~
hobs
And an expression can be boring and trite, and we can judge it for being such.

The fact that rich people are willing to pay for some bland expression does
not confer anything but monetary value to it. It doesn't become less garbage.

~~~
justinator
"Art is what you can get away with" – Andy Warhol

------
crucialfelix
The work of Art is the act of putting it up for auction on Christie's. That's
what makes it a conceptual piece that is being discussed.

People often mistake art for a form of labor production. They expect that
labor has to have been performed to create value. But that all changed in the
early 20th century.

I really feel bad for Dr. Beef, this must really hurt. But according to the
twitter thread (
[https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073](https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073)
) they didn't use the pre-trained models. In any case pre-trained models are
labor, not end product. They simply trained them from scratch. Possibly on the
same input set.

Even if his license was more strict, they still could have just rewritten the
same code and it would have escaped the licensing. Should the original GAN
paper ( [https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661](https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661) ? )
be given artistic credit here ? What is authorship in this context ? There is
a whole chain of people furthering things and doing labor and making
decisions.

Yet nobody has even mentioned the original artists whose works were used to
train the model. Would it be different if they were living artists ?

In what way is a GAN essentially different than photoshop copy and paste of
elements ?

~~~
delinka
"...they still could have just rewritten the same code and it would have
escaped the licensing."

I may be misinterpreting your intent, but this seems disingenuous to me. I
can't go look at the Linux kernel, then 'rewrite' [the same code] with my
fingers and keyboard to escape copyright ownership of Linux kernel
contributors.

I can rewrite code that implements a described process. Or code that
implements a described interface. If this was your intent, I'll take the blame
for misunderstanding. But I caution the use of phrases like "the same code"
when you actually mean new code that implements the same process.

~~~
karlerss
Somewhat related:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote)

> narrator/reviewer considers Menard's fragmentary Quixote (which is line-for-
> line identical to the original) to be much richer in allusion than
> Cervantes's "original" work because Menard's must be considered in light of
> world events since 1602.

------
_pastel
This article has by far my favorite explanation of GANs for image generation:

    
    
      To generate the image, the algorithm compared its own work to those in the data set until it could not tell them apart.
    

Amazingly succinct, lay-person friendly, and still pretty accurate.

------
Luc
"The painting, called Portrait of Edmond Belamy, was created by a Paris-based
art collective called Obvious."

Hopefully the person who wrote the code, freely shared it and even helped them
to get it running will see some of that ridiculous windfall:

[https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073](https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073)

~~~
logfromblammo
It isn't required by the license, but it is required by the primate fairness
sense. A donation to the open-source project would be appropriate.

Alternatively, the Obvious collective will be now and forevermore tagged as
non-contributing leeches. Which will likely not tarnish their enjoyment of
their $144k each before auction fees and taxes, but might discourage future
AI/ML developers from releasing under such a permissive license in the future.

~~~
therein
> Alternatively, the Obvious collective will be now and forevermore tagged as
> non-contributing leeches.

Exactly. It doesn't sound like they are afraid of this but they really should
be. Nobody will want to buy the next artwork of a collective with that
reputation.

~~~
Springtime
I do wonder how many art collectors who would be interested in such pieces
would know or care. To me the sale was due to the way it was promoted and sold
rather than any merit of the piece itself. Outside of particular tech story
comment sections and who've seen the Twitter threads I'm not sure it's going
to be some big controversy.

------
Zero2Ten
This could be something great if the author of the original algorithm and
datasets was given proper credits.

[https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055360024548012033](https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055360024548012033)

~~~
timClicks
I think that people don't seem to understand that most open source licences
don't require attribution. If you have released your code according to a
licence, what right do you have to complain that people are using that code in
accordance with that licence?

In this case though, it looks like Obvious did set out to attribute the
original GAN author and Christie's have omitted that.

~~~
minimaxir
> what right do you have to complain that people are using that code in
> accordance with that licence?

It’s not _legally_ required to credit the author of the original code, but
it’s a jerk move not to do so, especially if the work is primarily not your
own.

All it does is discourage developers from releasing things open source, which
is very bad in the long run.

~~~
talltimtom
> but it’s a jerk move...

What on earth are you on about!? The author has every possible opportunity to
set out whatever he wants in the license. If he wants anyone who uses it to
name their firstborn after him he can put that in there. If he doesn’t then
there is absolutely no issue or nothing jerk-like of anyone who follows to the
letter he license the author decided to use.

It’s up to the author to specify what he wants, and as long as users follow
the license that’s their right.

If you want a license that only allows non commercial usage to be unattributed
but requires attribution for commercial usage... then use such a license.
Don’t just put it up under a permissive license and rely on calling people
jerks when they literally do what you specified and gave them license to do.

> all it does is discourage developers from releasing things open source...

Great! Developers who don’t want others to use their software under an open
license shouldn’t be releasing it under an open license in the first place!
You have all the control as a creator, don’t give it away and then complain
that you gave it away like it’s someone else’s fault for using the license you
gave them.

~~~
yesenadam
Is it really that hard for you to understand what the GP was saying? A jerk is
somehow who, while not breaking the law, acts like..a jerk. They seem to think
being able to get away with something somehow makes it OK. (e.g. bullies,
trolls etc) Society relies on most people not acting like jerks most of the
time. You seem to be saying, if someone follows the letter of the law, they
possibly can't be a jerk. I guess you have no use for the word, as I don't
know who it could then possibly apply to.

I hear an increasing amount of talk as if _ethics_ is or can be entirely
contained within _law_ , as if behaving _legally_ is all that can or should be
asked of us as humans. I don't know if it's the pervasive influence of lawyers
and corporate 'culture' or what. In that "greed is good" etc mindset, 'being a
jerk' isn't a bad thing, it's merely _not being a sap, using your freedoms,
using accepted business principles_ etc. Your whole comment smells of that
total absence of ethics, beyond obeying the law, i.e. no ethics. Sorry if I
misunderstood. Maybe your "What on earth are you on about!?" etc was
exaggerated for rhetorical effect, and not what it seemed - having no clue why
someone might call it 'a jerk move', or feel it was
unfair/rude/graceless/exploitative etc.

~~~
arkades
The point isn’t that it’s legal or not. It’s that the creator -expressed his
wishes- for how his work would be treated when he chose his license.

There’s nothing unethical about respecting people’s freely chosen and publicly
expressed wishes.

~~~
yesenadam
Well, it seems to me that's stretching the meaning of words well beyond
breaking point. _respecting_? It sounds like it was uninformed 'consent'
doesn't it, like he didn't understand the licence. I get the feeling it's very
hard for experts in this area to relate to people who aren't, especially
without trying at all to do so, and they come over sounding like unfeeling
Vulcans.

------
whywhywhywhy
As someone who works in creative coding as an artist and has worked in
advertising (where this happens a lot) I feel deeply sorry that someone made
so much from this artists work they happily put out into the world, I’ve seen
this happen time and time again.

This is a really horrible life lesson that licenses matter and if you create
something it’s important to think through yourself how to make money off it
and do it yourself (and think hard if you care about that because caring
retroactively is too late), before you set it free because if you don’t do it
then someone else will and honestly you only have yourself to blame because
the reality is you didn’t want to put the small bit of extra effort required
to make money off the thing

~~~
mojomark
>you didn’t want to put the small bit of extra effort required to make money
off the thing

I agree with you, except for the words "small bit". As an inventor, with a few
issued and pending patents under my belt, I can assure you that bringing an
invention (software or hardware) to market is no small feat.

For me, concieving of crafty algorithms or a new device is the easy part. Even
writing a patent, whild time consuming, is straight forward. However, getting
people to buy said inventions and establishing an efficient "supply chain",
for me, is the excrutiatingly hard part. For some, this part comes naturally,
and it's the act of invention that is tough. For a lucky select few, they are
talented at both. Still, the requisite investment of time and money is
generally not small.

------
gesman
It has nothing to do with the object of sale but mostly with the fact that
it's Christie's effort.

Try to sell identical thing on eBay for $10 and watch the world making fun of
you at zero bids.

~~~
lultimouomo
This.

I don't have much sympathy for the sellers profiting off open source code
without apparently any intention of contributing back even a little, but it's
clear that the 400k valuation is not a direct outcome of the code quality -
after all you can make litteraly millions of painting from the same "author"
for bucks each. The 400k come from the marketing skills of the sellers (or, if
you're less generous, from the fact that they're probably very well connected
to the right people in the art market).

------
cycrutchfield
The results are so amateurish though. What’s with those nasty deconvolution
artifacts?

~~~
mattnewton
How will you know a computer did it and not an amateur unless it looks crappy
in a very specific way?

------
sammyo
An art photographer had a show where he presented his original photos of...
other famous photographs. Lovely controversy about what is an original photo.

It's just what a segment of the art world does - mess with the definition of
the art world. Look at Banksy's million dollar shredder.

------
everdev
I could see someone paying for the novelty of one of the first well-known AI
paintings, but I can imagine supply and demand economics will drive prices way
down as more high quality AI art floods the market. Good time to get in though
while supply is still low and demand is high.

~~~
mattnewton
Is this even good quality? I imagine this is just the novelty.. and even that
is quesionable to me.

The real feat for me isn’t in using this open source model to generate this
painting, it seems to be convincing anyone that this was worth $432k

------
rargulati
> winning bidder wished to be kept anonymous

I wonder if this is a marketing stunt, or an effort to increase the visibility
and legitimacy of AI generated art.

~~~
kleopullin
Purchasers of controversial artwork often chose to remain anonymous at least
initially. There's nothing unusual about this, and discussing it with friends
we all assumed it would sell 1) for much more and 2) to an anonymous buyer.
Nothing unusual about it.

------
stevep98
The artwork should have been generated during the auction itself, with
individual bids being seeds into the generative process. The bidders would
contribute to the next generation. You wouldn't know what the final product
would be. But, you'd own each of the steps in the process, not just the final
image.

You heard it here first!

------
habitue
The next logical thing is to sell a computer and a large 4K monitor that
creates a new painting for you every day

~~~
gnulinux
And you can do that for $2000, which is $430000 cheaper than that one
painting.

------
ForrestN
An interesting phenomenon is happening vis a vis the art market. Very rich
tech buyers are catapulting the value of artists (and, I guess, AI
collectives) that aren't really participating much in the "contemporary art"
discourse. I look at current art shows all day every day from all over the
world and have never heard anything about these people. It's the same with the
various "crypto artists."

For $400k you could buy a dozen works by some really influential artists. But
there's a big pool of money willing to buy work made by some 25 year olds that
is totally disconnected from any broader cultural apparatus related to art.
I'm fascinated, and wonder how the art world will respond. Clearly there is
money to be made.

------
thescriptkiddie
Is it an actual painting or a print?

~~~
kleopullin
It's printed on canvas, the AI did not paint it literally, it is digital art;
it's not an actual painting.

If you wanted, you could print your own!

------
kjullien
"Here's the code to the network they copied. If any of you guys want to make a
quick $10,000 from my work, now is the perfect time." Oh man he's going to be
more than upset about the price this got sold at :S

------
40acres
I'd buy art (and listen to music) generated by an AI, but I'll admit that I
think some creative products lose a bit of their essence when not created by
humans.

We know math and science can be found within art: measures and half measures
in music, the golden ratio in painting, etc. Optimizing for these mathematical
properties seems a bit like cheating for lack of a better word. There are many
musicians and artists without classical training that encounter these
attributes on their own, and manipulate them in different ways. I think part
of the reason why the arts are such a great platform for human creativity is
because of this.

~~~
kens
>I think some creative products lose a bit of their essence when not created
by humans

That debate goes way, way back. In 1966, a researcher at Bell Labs used a
computer to generate an image in the style of Mondrian. The images were
presented to 100 people; not only were test subjects unable to identify the
computer-generated image, but the majority liked the computer-generated image
better. The computer-generated art is now in the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art's collection.

[http://thekidsroad.com/assets/images/blog/blog-
content/mushu...](http://thekidsroad.com/assets/images/blog/blog-
content/mushup-remix/Noll_Mondrian.pdf)

~~~
amanaplanacanal
I believe the essence is this: The computer creates some number of pieces,
_from which a human selects the one that is shown._

Brian Eno quote about a related field: music "The great benefit of computer
sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the
issue of judgement"

------
mcemilg
This is a sad story. But Everybody needs to get some lesson from this case if
they publish their work as open. The open source licenses needs to update for
machine learning models.

------
samfriedman
Related: I know the authors used a DCGAN implementation (a pre-trained model,
it looks like), but is it known what their approach for up-scaling the
generated images is? In art generation I've seen GAN output of 128x128, e.g.
that is then upscaled with a super-resolution network. Is something similar
being done for the "final painting", or is the GAN somehow efficient enough to
do large-format output in a decent training time?

~~~
NegatioN
I don't know exactly what was used to upscale here, but Progressive Growing of
GANs[0] was a breakthrough last year that proved at least 1024x1024 was viably
producable.

The short explanation is: Train and freeze the most basic layer of the model
progressively to "let the network" understand higher resolution concepts one
piece at the time, and avoid mode-collapse.

The network architecture illustrating this a bit better is shown on page 3 of
the paper [1]

[0]:
[https://github.com/tkarras/progressive_growing_of_gans](https://github.com/tkarras/progressive_growing_of_gans)

[1]:
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.10196.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.10196.pdf)

~~~
madaxe_again
I think they’ve upscaled using Lanczos resampling and have then done wavelet
deconvolution - the thing is furry with artefacts, and looks just like when I
push an astronomical image too far.

------
hamilyon2
I almost see artifacts on painting, similar to simple NN algorithms like
[https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs/demo/image...](https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs/demo/image_regression.html)
produce.

------
DrNuke
That’s why hand-made artifacts will soon be back in force through a new
generation of more savvy art dealers, this hopefully being good for a startup
or good enough for lifestyle businesses in the coming decade.

------
Pristina
Imagine yourself writing a javascript library to do some mundane thing then
releasing it as GPL and then somebody made a slightly modified copy of it and
licenses it to google for 5M a year.

~~~
tedeh
The generally held opinion on this is that that would never work, because
Google has no reason to pay 5M a year to something that is available to anyone
for free. The keyword is "slightly modified" here which implies that the
modification is trivial. If the modifications are not trivial, then all bets
are off of course.

------
WAthrowaway
Proof that money cannot buy taste

------
tlrobinson
I'd like to see the first AI _self_ -portrait.

------
rcfox
I wonder if the person who bought it will sue for damages when the AI program
is inevitably used to spit out millions of similar portraits on demand.

~~~
kleopullin
Why would or could they? It's a digital print created by a computer algorithm.
Computer algorithms can't own copyrights, so you can print your own.

------
pgnas
Drill and uninspiring

------
sfled
Needs more shredder.

------
drb91
Suckers!

------
mysterEFrank
LOL at the signature on the painting

------
rhacker
All I can say is "follow the money"... I can see someone paying for the AI
program, but not for one of its digital outputs. I'm guessing this is an
internal purchase for the news story.

~~~
jermaustin1
I doubt this. It is more likely just a very wealthy person wanting to buy the
first artwork completely done by an AI that hit a major auction house.

That is news, the fact that it is in the news automatically adds to the cache
around the piece. That makes for a solid art investment.

~~~
drb91
The work could have been literally anything so long as it was generated by a
computer. The art here is convincing people the algorithm = AI.

------
king_magic
Color me extremely unimpressed. I just can't believe someone would pay that
much for something... so visually mediocre. When you look at how GANs work,
they are incredible for what they are (especially StackGAN / GANs conditioned
on some input)... but I just don't think there's any _real_ creativity - or
for that matter, intelligence - in GANs yet.

~~~
Raphmedia
It's one of the first work of art by an AI. Think of how much this fact alone
will increase the price of the painting in 200 years.

~~~
king_magic
Ehhhh, but is it _really_ a "work of art"? That's what I take issue with.

~~~
dagw
Surely anything successfully sold as a work of art at an art auction by an
auction house famous for selling works of art de facto becomes a work of art.

~~~
Raphmedia
That was my point. The fact that this is the first piece that is recognized as
a work of art AND was sold at a high price will only make this piece increase
in value as time go on.

~~~
dagw
Then we completely agree.

