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Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly skilled at mimicking human behaviour, heralding a new and potentially dystopian age, brought about by what The Art Newspaper has called "the AI revolution."1 Of specific concern to the creative sector, art making has been added to the growing artificial intelligence skillset, thereby introducing a series of ultra-contemporary concerns that threaten to destabilize several of the art world's organizing principles. As AI builds the capacity to independently generate artwork, not only by appropriating existing styles but also creating entirely new ones, human artists, galleries, and collectors must be prepared to ask whether such entities are entitled to attribution, remuneration, and ownership for their creative output. Do machine artists have the potential to supplant their human predecessors?
In the last two years, artworks produced by machine-learning algorithms have appeared in unprecedented numbers in art fairs, galleries, and auction houses. In 2018, SCOPE Miami Beach featured work generated by a technology named AICAN, the brainchild of Ahmed Elgammal, director of the Art & Artificial Intelligence Lab at Rutgers University. AICAN is described as both an artificial intelligence artist and a collaborative creative partner. It has been trained to generate original artworks by priming it with a hundred thousand samples from art history produced over the last five hundred years. The system's outputs reference existing styles within the Western art canon while simultaneously demonstrating the evolution of a unique aesthetic. AICAN's works have been displayed internationally, most recently in New York at HG Contemporary, in a 2019 solo exhibition titled Faceless Portraits Transcending Time. Elgammal is eager to emphasize the independence of his software, and he insists that AICAN be the only name credited while the works are on display.
Meanwhile, in October 2018, Portrait of Edmond de Belamy was reportedly the first portrait created by a neural network ever to be put on the block by a world-leading auction house-Christie's. The piece was made by the Paris-based collective Obvious (consisting of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier) and was purchased through a telephone bid by an anonymous buyer for $432,500 USD. The portrait features what appears to be a painted image of an indistinct man positioned slightly askew on a canvas in a conventional gilded frame. This historic sale and the...