A MASTERPIECE?

But can you name the artist?

This unfinished portrait of a portly French gentleman in a Puritan-style frock coat and white collar is expected to fetch up to $10,000 at a Christie’s auction in October.

But the work isn’t by an Old Master — it was made by a computer.

When it goes under the hammer in New York in October, “Portrait of Edmond de Belamy” will make history as the first auctioned piece of art created by artificial intelligence.

“AI has already been incorporated as a tool by contemporary artists and as this technology further develops, we are excited to participate in these continued conversations,” said Richard Lloyd, the international head of Prints & Multiples for Christie’s.

The subject is a member of the fictional Belamy family — a play on bel ami, French for handsome friend.

The work is a print on canvas in a gilded frame created by the Paris-based art collective Obvious, which consists of three 25-year-old Frenchmen: Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier.

They used a two-part algorithm, called a Generative Adversarial Network, in order to produce a work that might fool a weekend museumgoer.

The artists first fed the system a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th and 20th centuries, and the generator portion of the algorithm then started creating works.

It kept churning them out until it fooled the “discriminator” portion of the algorithm — which was created to distinguish between man-made and machine-made works of art.

“This new technology allows us to experiment on the notion of creativity for a machine, and the parallel with the role of the artist in the creation process,” said Caselles-Dupré.

He and his partners said they hope to show the public that algorithms can be creative.

“We wish to emphasize the parallel between the input parameters used for training an algorithm, and the expertise and influences that craft the style of an artist,” said Caselles-Dupré. “Most of all, we want the viewer to focus on the creative process: an algorithm usually functions by replicating human behavior, but it learns by using a path of its own.”