First AI Artwork Sold at Auction for $1m

A portrait of renowned English mathematician Alan Turing has sold for approximately $1 million at a Sotheby’s auction in London.

The extraordinary detail? The 2.2-metre painting, titled “AI-God”, was created by the robot artist Ai-Da. This marks the first instance of an AI-generated painting being auctioned.

The final sale price far surpassed expectations, having initially been estimated at between $130,000 and $190,000. During Thursday’s auction, Sotheby’s remarked that “today’s record price for the first artwork by a humanoid robot artist at auction reflects the growing intersection between AI technology and the global art market.”

Quoted in the British press, Ai-Da expressed that the portrait of Turing “invites viewers to reflect on the god-like nature of AI and computers while considering the ethical and societal implications of these advances.”

Ai-Da Looks Like a Human

Ai-Da, named after British mathematician Ada Lovelace, is a strikingly human-like robot, complete with a brown pageboy wig.

With AI-powered bionic hands, cameras in its eyes, and a sophisticated AI language model, Ai-Da is among the world’s most advanced humanoid robots. Developed in 2019 by researchers at the University of Oxford, Ai-Da can observe and create art with remarkable realism.

Turing’s Legacy as a Pioneer

Alan Turing, a pioneering mathematician and computer scientist, was instrumental in the fight against Nazi Germany, serving as a code breaker.

Following the war, Turing designed an early digital computer and discussed the potential of artificial intelligence in his influential 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. Here, he introduced the “Turing Test” as a means of assessing whether a machine can emulate human thought.

With the advent of Ai-Da’s art, Turing’s ideas on machine intelligence resonate with renewed relevance.

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