An artificial intelligence-generated portrait of British mathematician Alan Turing has been sold at auction for nearly $1.1 million. The painting is titled “A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing”. This was reported by The New York Times.
The author of the painting, so to speak, is the former owner of the gallery and a resident of Oxford, Aidan Miller. Initially, the painting was estimated at $120,000 to $180,000. But after the auction started, 27 bids were submitted. As a result, the painting was sold to an anonymous buyer from the United States.
“I am trying to adapt to this slightly surreal moment,” says Meller.
According to Miller, the proceeds from the sale of the painting will help finance new design improvements to the Ai-Da robot. The robot is named after Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century mathematician who is recognized as the world’s first computer programmer.
Meller assures that the idea to generate a portrait of Alan Turing was suggested by Ai-Da when the inventor asked it to do something for an artificial intelligence conference. The robot responded with a proposal to draw a portrait of Turing as a man who foresaw the power of artificial intelligence technology back in the 1950s.
The Ai-Da program interpreted Turing’s photograph and created 15 separate paintings based on different parts of his face. The works were then photographed and uploaded to a computer that used the Ai-Da language model. A single picture was assembled from them and printed using a three-dimensional textured printer. Studio assistants helped create a more realistic finished product on canvas. Then Ai-Da added marks and textures to the portrait.
This is not the first time a work of art created by artificial intelligence has been sold at auction. In 2018, Christie sold a painting created by a French startup’s algorithm for $432,500. The artist Refik Anadol sold several works of “Machine Hallucination” created with the help of artificial intelligence for millions of dollars during the NFT boom of 2021.
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