Portrait of Famous British Mathematician, Drawn by Artificial Intelligence, Sold for a Million Dollars
The artificial intelligence of the Ai Da robot generated a portrait of British mathematician Alan Turing. The painting was sold at auction for nearly $1.1 million, The New York Times reports.
The work is called ‘A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing’.
The author of the painting, so to speak, is the former owner of the gallery and Oxford resident Aidan Miller. Initially, the painting was estimated at $120,000 - $180,000.
But after the auction started, 27 bids were submitted. As a result, the painting was sold to an anonymous buyer from the United States.
‘I'm trying to comprehend the surrealism of this moment,’ says Møller.
According to him, the proceeds from the sale of the painting will help finance new improvements to the design of the Ai Da robot. The robot is named after Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century mathematician who is recognised as the world's first computer programmer.
Møller assures that the idea to generate a portrait of Alan Turing was suggested by Ai-Da when the inventor asked it to do something for an artificial intelligence conference. The robot responded with a proposal to draw a portrait of Turing as a man who foresaw the power of artificial intelligence technology back in the 1950s.
Ai-Da interpreted Turing's photograph and created 15 separate paintings based on different parts of his face. The artworks were then photographed and uploaded to a computer that used the Ai-Da language model. They were assembled into a single picture and printed using a three-dimensional textured printer. Studio assistants helped create a more realistic finished product on canvas. Then Ai-Da added marks and textures to the portrait.
This is not the first time a work of art created by artificial intelligence has been sold at auction. In 2018, Christie sold a painting created by a French startup's algorithm for $432,500. The artist Refik Anadol sold several works of Machine Hallucination created with the help of artificial intelligence for millions of dollars during the NFT boom of 2021.
At the end of October, Sotheby's put up the painting ‘A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing’ for auction.