Christie's offered 'Portrait of Edmond de Belamy' (2018) by the Paris-based collective Obvious at its October 23-25 Prints and Multiples sale in New York, making it the first AI-generated artwork to sell at a major auction house. The work, produced using a generative adversarial network, sold for $432,500, more than 43 times its pre-sale high estimate of $10,000.

The work was produced using a generative adversarial network (GAN) trained on a dataset of 15,000 historical portraits spanning the 14th to 20th centuries. Christie's listed the medium of the lot as 'Generative Adversarial Network print, on canvas,' with no individual human artist attributed as creator. The sale was part of Christie's regular Prints & Multiples auction in New York. Christie's specialist Richard Lloyd noted the auction house's intent to 'participate in these continued conversations' about AI's role in art creation.