''Edmond de Belamy'' is a

generative adversarial network A generative adversarial network (GAN) is a class of machine learning frameworks designed by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in June 2014. Two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is a ...

portrait painting Portrait Painting is a genre in painting, where the intent is to represent a specific human subject. The term 'portrait painting' can also describe the actual painted portrait. Portraitists may create their work by commission, for public and pr ...

constructed in 2018 by Paris-based arts-collective ''Obvious.'' Printed on canvas, the work belongs to a series of generative images called La Famille de Belamy. The name Belamy is a tribute to

Ian Goodfellow Ian J. Goodfellow (born ) is a computer scientist, engineer, and executive, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He was previously employed as a research scientist at Google Brain and director of machine lea ...

, inventor of GANs; In French “bel ami” means “good friend" so it is a translated pun of Goodfellow.” It achieved widespread notoriety after

Christie's Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie (auctioneer), James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, at Rockefeller Center in New York City and at Alexandra House in Hong Kong. It is ...

announced its intention to auction the piece as the first artwork created using

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

to be featured in a Christie's auction. It surpassed pre-auction estimates which valued it at $7,000 to $10,000, instead selling for $432,500. The piece is a portrait of a somewhat-blurry man. It is a print on canvas measuring 27 x 27 in (700 x 700 mm.) set within a gilded wood frame. The image was created by an algorithm that referenced 15,000 portraits from various periods. It is signed at the bottom right with

\min_\max_E_\left log(\mathcal(x))\right E_\left log(1-\mathcal(\mathcal(z)))\right /math>, which is part of the algorithm code that produced it. The algorithm was trained on a set of 15,000 portraits from online art encyclopedia WikiArt, spanning the 14th to the 19th century.

The organization that produced it is called Obvious. It is a collective comprising three people, Pierre Fautrel, Hugo Caselles-Dupré and Gauthier Vernier, who are based in Paris, France.

The piece has been criticized because it was created using a

(GAN) software package based on prior research by others and implemented by Robbie Barrat, an AI artist who was not affiliated with Obvious, leading to allegations that Obvious contributed minimally to the final work product. Posts on the project's issue tracker show Obvious members requesting that Barrat provide support and custom features. The piece has also been placed within a tradition, dating back to Duchamp's

Bicycle Wheel A bicycle wheel is a wheel, most commonly a wire wheel, designed for a bicycle. A pair is often called a wheelset, especially in the context of ready built "off the shelf" performance-oriented wheels. Bicycle wheels are typically designed ...

of 1913 and Tinguely's Méta-matics of the late 1950s, of works calling into question the basis of the modern art market, and highlighting the comic aspects of technology. Research has used Edmond de Belamy to show how anthropomorphizing AI can affect allocations of responsibility and credit to artists.

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Further reading