AI-generated portrait of Alan Turing fetches record $1.3m at auction
An AI generated portrait of the eminent World War II codebreaker, Alan Turing, has been sold for a record $1.3 million at auction.
There were 27 bids for the digital artwork sale of “AI God”, which had been originally estimated to sell for between $120,000 (£9,252) and $180,000 (£139,000), said Sotherby’s, reported BBC.
It is worth noting that mathematician Turing was a pioneer of computer science and was also known as the father of artificial intelligence (AI).
As per the auction house, the historic sale “launches a new frontier in the global art market, establishing the auction benchmark for an artwork by a humanoid robot”.
The work by Ai-Da Robot is “the first humanoid robot artist to have an artwork sold at auction”, it added.
Additionally, the art piece is a large scale original portrait of Turing, who studied at King’s College, Cambridge.
By helping to crack codes and deciphering the infamous Enigma machine at Bletchley Park, the scientist played a crucial role in the Allies’ victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.
He produced a detailed design for a digital computer in the modern sense after the war.
Moreover, Sotherby’s said the online sale, which ended at 19:00GMT on Thursday, was bought by an undisclosed buyer for a price “far outstripping the artwork’s estimate price”.
The auction house said the sale price for the first artwork by a humanoid robot artist “marks a moment in the history of modern and contemporary art and reflects the growing intersection between AI technology and the global art market”.
