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Comment by king_magic | Hacker News Reader

Color me extremely unimpressed. I just can't believe someone would pay that much for something... so visually mediocre. When you look at how GANs work, they are incredible for what they are (especially StackGAN / GANs conditioned on some input)... but I just don't think there's any real creativity - or for that matter, intelligence - in GANs yet.

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Maybe that's what attracted the buyer, that this is an early work of AI art.

“AI” meaning what exactly? The real work of art here is convincing the buyer this algorithm is meaningful.

I have the same impression. It reminds me of the infamous “Ecce Homo” from Boria.

Other style transfer AIs have produced much more spectacular results without blurring the image.

It's one of the first work of art by an AI. Think of how much this fact alone will increase the price of the painting in 200 years.

Ehhhh, but is it really a "work of art"? That's what I take issue with.

Surely anything successfully sold as a work of art at an art auction by an auction house famous for selling works of art de facto becomes a work of art.

That was my point. The fact that this is the first piece that is recognized as a work of art AND was sold at a high price will only make this piece increase in value as time go on.

Then we completely agree.

Except it really isn’t - it’s an output of an ML algo designed for one task, which I’d hesitate to call AI.

I had my portrait painted by a robot with a camera and some variety of edge-finding DSP at the London Science Museum in about 1990 - and they touted that as “AI art”.

Also - what about Conway’s game of life? Is that not art?

There is a difference between price and value: an art collector may buy a ‘work of art’ for a ridiculous price, hoping that someone else will buy it for an even more ridiculous price. However, the speculations of art collectors do not determine the actual value of the ‘work of art.’ And it seems that very few people outside of the art collecting business actually value AI generated artwork (that’s probably why it was expected to sell for only 10k).

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