Christie's deployed the auction of the first AI-generated artwork sold at a major auction house in October 2018, when 'Portrait of Edmond de Belamy' by the Paris-based collective Obvious sold for $432,500 — more than 40 times its pre-sale estimate. This event established Christie's as the first major auction house to bring an algorithm-generated artwork to market.

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.