On October 31, Sotheby’s auction house will organize an online auction, Digital Art Day Auction, dedicated to digital art. One of the lots is the painting “God AI. Portrait of Alan Turing” (A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing), which was written by a humanoid robot with artificial intelligence.
Image source: sothebys.com
This is the first time that a major auction house has offered such a work for sale – they expect to fetch between £100,000 and £150,000. The painting depicts the British mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing, who is considered one of the founders of computer science. The “author” of the canvas was the Ai-Da robot with AI. It was created at Oxford University in 2019 and named after the English mathematician Ada Lovelace, who described a computer back in the last century and wrote the first program for it in 1842.
«With my portrait of Alan Turing, I pay tribute to his achievements and contributions to computer science and AI. “My work complies with the UN principles for the responsible use of AI – and this is what Alan Turing advocated,” the Ai-Da robot was quoted as saying, to which large AI language models were connected to conduct conversations.
Painting “God AI. Portrait of Alan Turing” was exhibited at the UN along with four other works in May this year. Ai-Da also portrayed some of the Glastonbury Festival attendees: Billie Eilish, Diana Ross, Kendrick Lamar and Paul McCartney.