Christie's in New York had put an estimated sale value on the painting, Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, of between $7,000 and $10,000. Winning the auction was an anonymous telephone bidder, who outbid two other phone bidders, an online bidder, and a bidder physically in the auction room.

Pulling the strings behind the AI painting efforts are Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernir, owners of a collective named Obvious. They used a computer model called a Generative Adversarial Network to take a virtual fine-toothed-comb tour through 15,000 human-drawn portraits for the last several centuries and recreate art based on the dataset.

The painting is one of 11 portraits of members of the Belamy family, a fictional construct named after Ian Goodellow, who invented the modeling method in 2014. ("Goodfellow" in English is roughly "bel ami" in French.)

Portrait of Edmond de Belamy was the first painting produced by artificial intelligence sold at a major auction house. Another family portrait, Le Comte de Belamy, sold to a private collector for $11,430 earlier in 2018.

Also earlier in 2018, AI-generated art was the start of the show at both Paris's Grand Palais museum and a large commercial gallery in India.