Portrait of Edmond Belamy, a painting created by a Paris-based art collective called Obvious, was generated by using an algorithm and a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th and 20th centuries.

It sold during the October 23-25 Prints & Multiples sale at Christie’s, making it the first piece of AI art to go under the hammer at a major auction house, Christie’s said.

The art collective comprises of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier, and uses a method called GAN — an acronym for generative adversarial network — to explore the intersection of art and artificial intelligence.