Rise of the Ghost Machines
I was halfway through writing the first draft of a novel about artificial intelligence when I heard that Christie’s planned to auction a portrait produced by AI. This was before DALL-E, before GPT3, before Gemini, Grok, and the latest chatbots. At the time, the idea of an algorithm producing art was plausible, but ridiculous. In theory, it was possible to auction off the bizarre renderings of generative adversarial networks, but who would want to pay for it?
I went to see this AI-produced portrait in October 2018, at a public viewing before the actual auction. Despite living for 20 years in Manhattan, I’d never been inside the Christie’s building. The place was lit like a museum and decorated like a corporate event space, wood paneled, muted. Paintings, sketches, sculptures, curios, all were kept in neat, orderly arrangements—it felt like somebody’s idea of an ideal spot to meet with a financial advisor. Small groups of people stood around, looking at Lichtenstein prints, at the sketches of other famous artists.
My first thought as I studied the AI piece was that it looked like something spat out by an inkjet printer. My second thought was, wait, it probably was printed by an inkjet. According to the marketing material, an algorithm produced this image after scanning and storing the attributes of 15,000 paintings from the 1300s through the 1900s and then using a generative adversarial neural network to produce something that belonged to the same set. All legit. Except what it landed on looked like nothing worth looking at. Imagine a blurry, spectral approximation of a man, his face blurred, like an out-of-focus portrait photo.
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