The work, initially estimated at between 7 and 10 thousand dollars, was then sold for as much as 432 thousand dollars.
Everything was born from the genius of a French research group called Obvious, composed of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier. They used the Gan (Generative Adversarial Networks) technology, developed by the researcher Ian Goodfellow, from whom the painting takes its name (it seems in fact that the translation of his surname in French is beautiful hooks).
The French group, has made it possible for the algorithm, to analyze a database containing 15 thousand paintings made between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries, the rest is all the result of the machine.
The algorithm is characterized by a “Generator” that creates the new image and a “Discriminator” that tries to distinguish which of this image is the work of a human being and which is not. The objective was precisely to “confuse” the Discriminator, so that even those generated by machines could be recognized as true portraits. So as to be able to achieve the result obtained.The Portrait of Edmond Belamy is part of a series of 11 paintings invented by AI.
No painter’s instrument, but like any artist who leaves a mark on his works, the algorithm has also left its signature at the bottom right.
The work portrays a French man who never existed, created specifically by the algorithm, the white collar and the Puritan style, all embellished with a strong golden frame.