Portrait painted by artificial intelligence goes up for auction at Christie's in New York and could fetch $10,000

Christie's, the auction house that has sold paintings by Picasso and Monet at record prices, is now poised to set another milestone with the first-ever auction of art created by artificial intelligence.

The AI-generated “Portrait of Edmond Belamy” depicts a slightly blurry, chubby man in a dark frock-coat and white collar. 

His off-centre position leaves enough white space to show the artist's signature as 'min max Ex[log(D(x))] + Ez[log(1-D(G(z)))].

The painting - which will go under the hammer on Thursday in New York - is expected to fetch as much as $10,000, the Daily Mail reports.

The artwork is one of a group of portraits of the fictional Belamy family created by a Paris-based trio of 25-year-olds.

They used a “generative adversarial network” to store 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th and 15th centuries into the algorithm. 

It churned out works until it was able to fool a test designed to distinguish whether an image was created by human or computer. 

“It may not have been painted by a man in a powdered wig, but it is exactly the kind of artwork we have been selling for 250 years,” said Christie's sale organiser Richard Lloyd in a statement.

The portrait offered by Christie's for sale in New York from Oct. 23 to 25 was created with AI programmed by the Paris-based collective Obvious, whose members include Hugo Caselles-Dupra, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier.

Mr Vernier played down suggestions their innovative artwork would put traditional artists out of work.

He said: 'There is enough space for us all. 

"We see this as a new branch of art, in the same way as photography was in the 1800s.

'We're a new generation of creatives but we certainly won't replace other innovative artists.'

The three men live together in a flat in Paris and met at university, where Pierre Fautrel and Mr Vernier studied business, and their colleague Hugo Caselle-Dupre studied technology.

Of the system used to create the pioneering artwork, Mr Caselles-Dupré said: 'The aim is to fool the discriminator into thinking that the new images are real-life portraits.