Christie's, the auction house that has sold paintings by Picasso and Monet at record prices, was poised on Tuesday to set another milestone with the first-ever auction of art created by artificial intelligence.

A woman looks at a work of art created by an algorithm by French collective named OBVIOUS which produces art using artificial intelligence, titled "Portrait of Edmond de Belamy" at Christie’s in New York on October 22, 2018. [Photo: VCG]

The AI-generated "Portrait of Edmond Belamy" depicts a slightly blurry chubby man in a dark frock-coat and white collar, and his off-center position leaves enough white space to show the artist's signature as "min max Ex[log(D(x))] + Ez[log(1-D(G(z)))].

It took 15,000 paintings and more than eight centuries to produce the Portrait of Edmond Belamy. Conceived by the Paris-based Obvious Collective, the resulting image -- a blurry face of a European man that evokes centuries past -- is the first piece of art generated by artificial intelligence sold by a major auction house.

Christie's New York is conducting the auction for the computer-printed portrait on Tuesday. The piece may fetch as much as $10,000, the company said in a statement.