How Can AI Art Models Be Controlled and Monetized?
An unfinished portrait painted by artificial intelligence hanging at Christie’s New York opposite an Andy Warhol print has been sold for 45 times its high estimate and much more than the Warhol work. “Edmond de Belamy”, the title of the portrait, has been sold for $432,500 including fees, by an anonymous phone bidder.
The bidding lasted just a few minutes, during which the buyers competed against an online bidder in France, two other phone bidders and one person in the room in New York. When the hammer came down, the bids had reached $350,000, the final price before fees.
The painting, if that is the right term to use, is one of a group of portraits of the fictional Belamy family created by Obvious, a Paris-based collective, actually engaged in exploring the interface between art and artificial intelligence, by using Generative Adversarial Network (GAN).
“It is an exciting moment,” stated Obvious in a statement. “Our hope is that the spotlight on this sale will bring forward the amazing work that our predecessors and colleagues have been producing.”
The auction was inspired by a sale earlier this year, in which the French collector Nicolas Laugero Lasserre bought a portrait directly from the collective for about 10,000 euros, or about $11,400.
The auctioned portrait seemed to be a test of the traditional art market’s interest in AI art. But the strongest response came from other artists who already work with AI, many of whom have stated that the work is unoriginal. GANs have been used in art since around 2015, including by the artists Robbie Barrat, Anna Ridler and Mario Klingemann. Many even believe the AI model that was used was basically unchanged code from Robbie Barrat.
The use of artificial intelligence in fields more traditionally considered safe from automation and algorithms keeps growing, with interesting results. Besides fine arts, AI is increasingly used in music with mind blowing experiments that may put the industry in crisis and ultimately supporting big production houses, with the opportunity to gain almost zero-costs profits from music, especially if we consider the perfect marriage between AI and Blockchain.
The biggest questions, however, arise from the real meaning of the AI art. Is it still to be considered art, as with the artist’s condensed perceptions and feeling of the outward and inward world, or should it be considered as just a piece of technical prowess?
While experts will be busy trying to answer these questions, Artificial Intelligence will become gradually more sophisticated. Particularly, with the coming of data exchanges like the Bottos AI ecosystem based on its own Blockchain, there would be a rise in high-quality data availability for AI training, with algorithms and models becoming more and more complex and advanced. Furthermore, with a higher availability of data at lower costs, Bottos may push forward the development of Artificial General Intelligence that would thus reach, one day, surprising peaks of intelligence. At that time, AI may actually be capable to “experience” the world around it and, who knows, may be able to express it in art forms.
As Christie’s has already stressed the importance of Blockchain in the art world this summer — with a summit all dedicated to it — the use of Bottos Models Market can offer new ways to monetize the art works. In this case, for example, much of the algorithm and technique used to generate the record portrait has much to do with the work of Robbie Barrat, a fresh high-school graduate from West Virginia that has been experimenting with the GAN, producing some pretty amazing works, the so-called nudes.
Using the Bottos Models Market, the model developed and used by Barrat may have been protected and rightfully exchanged, letting him monetize his model as it comes to be used to generate other piece of arts.
This simple example of AI model monetization may already open a new window in the art industry, first of all for artists, that would feel safer and more willing to create.
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