First piece of artificial intelligence artwork to ever sell at a major auction was a blurry portrait called Edmond de Belamy, and it went for nearly half a million dollars in 2018.

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First piece of artificial intelligence artwork to ever sell at a major auction was a blurry portrait called Edmond de Belamy, and it went for nearly half a million dollars in 2018. The Parisian art collective Obvious created the image using an open-source generative adversarial network fed with thousands of historical portraits, signing the bottom of the canvas with the literal mathematical formula of the algorithm. Traditional art critics were absolutely furious that a slightly smudged digital output managed to fetch more money than works by established human masters. It was a stark warning of the bleak generative future to come, proving that wealthy art collectors will eagerly shell out massive fortunes for literally anything with a sufficiently pretentious backstory. We spent centuries perfecting the human expression of the soul through paint, only to get outbid by a random number generator