Obvious

Obvious is a Paris-based collective of three childhood friends — Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier — who began experimenting with generative adversarial networks out of an apartment in 2017. A year later they were the most famous AI artists in the world.

The $432,500 portrait

On October 25, 2018, Christie’s auctioned their Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, a smeared, gilt-framed likeness of a fictional gentleman generated by a GAN trained on some 15,000 portraits from the 14th to the 19th century and “signed” with the algorithm’s loss function. Estimated at $7,000–$10,000, it hammered at $432,500 — the first AI artwork sold at a major auction house, and the moment the art market was forced to take machine-made images seriously.

The triumph came with a controversy that has followed them since: the work was built on open-source code by then-19-year-old artist Robbie Barrat, used, as Caselles-Dupré later acknowledged, with little modification. Fellow AI artist Mario Klingemann suggested most of the actual work was Barrat’s, and critics cast the sale as marketing outpacing craft. The collective weathered the storm and kept building.

In 2023 Obvious institutionalized its practice, founding Obvious Research, an AI research laboratory embedded in Sorbonne University and backed by the French National Research Agency, dedicated to open-source generative tools for artists. Its flagship project turns fMRI brain scans into images — art generated, quite literally, from the mind’s eye — with results exhibited at Danysz gallery in 2024.