A 19-year-old code for the AI ​​portrait that sold for $ 432,000 at Christie's

Robbie Barrat was 17 and bored in West Virginia when he started experimenting with artificial intelligence and art.

First, he has a computer to write original rap songs by feeding it 6,000 Kanye West lyrics. Then, he taught it how to make landscape paintings and nude portraits by feeding it thousands of images scraped off the Internet. He uploaded the code to GitHub, the code-sharing platform, so that he could download it and learn from it.

And many did – including the French art collectively known as Obvious, which sold for $ 432,500 at Christie's on Thursday in an internationally celebrated art auction. That's about 45 times higher than Christie's $ 10,000, the auction house said in an article on its website.

"I was really expecting people to use [the code] as components for their own project. But I never thought it would be good, just because it's not high-quality work, "Barrat, now 19 and working at a Stanford University AI research lab, told The Washington Post." It was a project I did in my free time when I was 17. "

Obvious, made up of three 25-year-old students, made the AI ​​portrait using an existing algorithm and Barrat's code, among other things, the group reported in an in-depth article by The Verge earlier this week.

Titled "Portrait of Edmond Belamy," the artwork was the subject of this page for its unconventionality in a major auction Christie's house, which lined it up in the same room as work by Warhol and Lichtenstein and heralded it for its novelty . The portrait emits a quality known as the uncanny valley: that feels like you're going to have something to do with a human, but it's not quite there. The man in the portrait has no nose. He has a blob for a mouth and his eyes resemble that of Frosty the Snowman. It appears, as its bottom-right signature indicates, to be the work of an algorithm.

But for all its apparent peculiarity, the relatively small AI art community has been describing it as utterly, lagging behind advancements by other artists in the AI ​​art world. Mario Klingemann, a Germany-based AI artist who has been cited as an inspiration, told The Post he was shocked. He said he believed that "maybe this is just a practical joke among oligarchs."

"It's horrible art from an aesthetic standpoint," he said. "You have to put some work into it to call it art. [The Obvious portrait] is something that everybody can do. You can clone this [code] from GitHub, start your computer and start doing it. I do not know that that is what art is about. You have to put your own handwriting on it, make your own mark with these tools. That takes some learning and work and finding something different to say. "

Obvious has never been denied that their work has been made on the innovations made by others. In fact, the name of the painting itself is a reference to the inventor of the algorithm who has made this whole field of AI art possible, to a Google Brain AI research scientist named Ian Goodfellow. "Belamy," the name of the fictional man in the portrait, is a play on "Bel ami," which means "good friend" in French.

Evidently, he was confirmed to be a co-founder of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, who was confirmed to be a member of the group in October 2017. "If you Just talking about the code, then there is a big percentage that has been modified, "Caselles-Dupré said. "But if you talk about working on the computer, making it work, there is a lot of effort there."

Using Goodfellow's algorithm, getting to the bartender at 10 p.m. on a Saturday: If it's good enough and the bartender is busy enough, he might let it pass.

It is the same thing with the computer networks: It's like the Turing test, except both participants are machines.

To train the first computer network to produce a portrait, for example, Then, the second computer, called the discriminator, plays the referee and decides if it passes the smell test. If it does not, like a bouncer confiscates a fake ID, the first computer has to "go back to the drawing board" and must try harder at producing convincing art, Klingemann said.

Once it succeeds, the result is usually bizarre and abstract, and perhaps even imaginative.

"[The computers] learn from the ground up, "Klingemann said. "Initially both parties do not know what criteria to look for. It's only about time, in this feedback loop, that they improve their capabilities of spotting the differences. Eventually it becomes so good that even a human can not distinguish it from fake or real anymore. "

15000 portraits painted between the 14th and 20th century as part of its "training" for the computer.

In a statement following the announcement of Edmond Belamy, "Obvious tipped their hats to Goodfellow and Barrat.

Ian Goodfellow, the creator of the GAN algorithm, who inspired the name of the Belamy Family, and artist Robbie Barrat, said: "We would like to thank the AI ​​community, especially for those who have been using this technology. , who has been a great influence for us. It is an exciting moment and our hope is that the spotlight will have been brought forward.