In a world first, a portrait generated by an algorithm has been sold by a major auction house in New York, garnering a significant amount of media attention.

The renowned Christie’s auction house predicted that the Artificial Intelligence (AI)-created art would sell for $7,000 (£5,428) to $10,000 (£7,755). However, the final figure was considerably higher – a staggering $432,000 (£335,000).

The artwork was created by a Paris-based art collective made up of artists and researchers called Obvious, co-founded by Pierre Fautrel, Hugo Caselles-Dupre and Gauthier Vernier. According to the co-founders, the purpose of the painting and of Obvious was to prove that AI is capable of more than just operating driverless cars or transforming manufacturing – it can be creative.

The portrait, ‘Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy’, was crafted using ink, canvas and an AI algorithm, and signed with a maths equation. It is one of 11 AI paintings made by the collective.

Fautrel told CNBC: “We gave the algorithm 15,000 portraits and the algorithm understands what rules of the portraits are, and creates another one.”

The AI compared its own work to those in the data set until it could not distinguish its own work from the originals.

Experts from Christie’s noted that art would be a hard genre for AI to take on: “Since humans are highly attuned to the curves and complexities of a face in a way that a machine cannot be.”

This was taken into consideration by Obvious when approaching the project. Casselle-Dupre said: “We did some work with nudes and landscapes, and we also tried feeding the algorithm sets of works by famous painters.

“But we found that portraits provided the best way to illustrate our point, which is that algorithms are able to emulate creativity.”

Christie’s specialist Richard Llyod, who organised the sale, said: “AI is just one of several technologies that will have an impact on the art market of the future – although it is far too early to predict what those changes might be.”