AI-generated portrait of Alan Turing fetches record $1.3m at auction

An AI generated portrait of the eminent World War II codebreaker, Alan Turing, has been sold for a record $1.3 million at auction.

There were 27 bids for the digital artwork sale of “AI God”, which had been originally estimated to sell for between $120,000 (£92,563) and $180,000 (£139,000), said Sotherby’s, reported BBC.

It is worth noting that mathematician Turing was a pioneer of computer science and was also known as the father of artificial intelligence (AI).

As per the auction house, the historic sale “launches a new frontier in the global art market, establishing the auction benchmark for an artwork by a humanoid robot”.

The work by Ai-Da Robot is “the first humanoid robot artist to have an artwork sold at auction”, it added.

Additionally, the art piece is a large scale original portrait of Turing, who studied at King’s College, Cambridge.

By helping to crack codes and deciphering the infamous Enigma machine at Bletchley Park, the scientist played a crucial role in the Allies’ victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.

He produced a detailed design for a digital computer in the modern sense after the war.

Moreover, Sotherby’s said the online sale, which ended at 19:00GMT on Thursday, was bought by an undisclosed buyer for a price “far outstripping the artwork’s estimate price”.

The auction house said the sale price for the first artwork by a humanoid robot artist “marks a moment in the history of modern and contemporary art and reflects the growing intersection between AI technology and the global art market”.