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AI Auctions at Sotheby’s — How Much Is Robot Art Worth?

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James Morales
Last Updated

Key Takeaways

  • An artwork created by the robot Ai-Da will be auctioned at Sotheby’s at the end of the month.
  • Launched in 2019, Ai-Da incorporates AI and robotics to create paintings.
  • Other similar initiatives have also attracted the attention of major auction houses.

Artwork by the robot artist Ai-Da will be auctioned  at Sotheby’s on Oct. 31, making it one of the first AI-generated art pieces to be auctioned at a prestigious art house.

Following the robot’s first major gallery exhibition at London’s Design Museum in 2021, British media reports suggest the Sotheby’s sale is expected to generate £100,000-£150,000 and could help catalyze interest in other similar artists.

GANism Meets Robot Art

First revealed to the public in 2019, Ai-Da represents the union of two techno-artistic traditions: machines that paint and neural networks that generate images.

A dark and distorted portrait of Alan Turing, “A.I. God,” was conceived by a generative adversarial network (GAN), a type of machine learning model that has become the tool of choice for artists like Refik Anadol and Mario Klingemann.

Unlike other GAN artists, the project’s technical innovation lies in Ai-Da’s ability to manipulate paint on canvas.

In the 1960s, computer art pioneers like Frieder Nake and Vera Molnár experimented with simple algorithms and graphical plotters to create some of the first-ever generative artworks. 

Later, in 1973, Harold Cohen emerged as a strong contender for the first AI artist, developing AARON. This computer program worked with random variables to make its own decisions on coloring and composition.

Similar Artworks

Today, Ai-Da is a manifestation of AARON’s legacy that demonstrates just how far AI and robotics have come in 50 years.

Although it is the most well-known AI art robot, other similar projects have also attracted attention.

Sougwen Chung’s Doug (Drawing Operations Unit Generation) consists of a robotic arm powered by AI software. It explores the notion of human-machine co-creation, with the artist and her robot working together to create paintings.

Meanwhile, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s “Can’t Help Myself” employed an industrial robot and complex visual-recognition system in a unique blend of AI performance and kinetic sculpture.

Botto: The First Decentralized Autonomous Artist

A key figure in the field of AI art is Mario Klingemann, whose installation “Memories of Passersby I” was the first piece of GAN art to sell at a Sotheby’s auction in 2019.

In 2021, the German artist made waves again when he teamed up with software collective ElevenYellow to create Botto, a decentralized, autonomous AI artist trained on libraries selected by a global community of contributors.

Reflecting how image generation technology has evolved, Botto uses a number of models, both GANs and newer generative frameworks like Stable Diffusion. Meanwhile, it generates its own prompts using text generators.

Anyone who holds $BOTTO can join the BottoDAO to vote on what the AI should do next and help curate the model’s outputs, influencing its direction through collective decision-making.

The project made history on Thursday, Oct. 24, when a Sotheby’s sale marking its third birthday raised $351,600 across six lots. Since its debut, Botto has amassed over $4 million in total sales. 

Commenting on the sale, Sotheby’s Head of Digital Art, Michael Bouhanna, observed that Botto’s “decentralized and collaborative process pushes boundaries, allowing us to reimagine how creativity is shaped.” 

“By inviting collective input from thousands, Botto challenges traditional concepts of artistic authorship and brings us closer to a future where human and machine collaboration becomes a defining force in art creation,” he added.

Is AI Art Valuable?

With its expected price range,  “A.I. God” is on track to become Ai-Da’s most valuable artwork. But other AI-generated artworks have fetched even more. 

In 2018, “Portrait of Edmond Belamy” by French collective Obvious sold  at Christie’s for $432,500, marking the first time a major auction house listed a piece of GAN art.

The sale was controversial because Obvious used an open-source neural network built by another artist without attribution, raising the question of who takes credit for AI art.

Probably the most well-known artist in the space is Refik Anadol, who has made over $30 million  selling his artworks as NFTs. In 2021, his most valuable piece, “Machine Hallucinations — Space: Metaverse,” raised over $2.3 million at a Sotheby’s Hong Kong auction.

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