ESSAY text by BEAU FRIEDLANDER Artificial intelligence is not a technophile invention poised to spin out of control and destroy the planet, but it could turn the best things about being human into the worst kind of shitty clickbait. Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier make something called algorithmic art and, in the process, they also make headline news. Creating a sample set consisting of thousands of portraits and an algorithm to sort them, then assigning aesthetic value to each of them, the collaborators “caused” (I guess that’s how you’d have to put it) the creation of a work entitled Portrait of Edmond de Belamy. The portrait was touted as the world’s first example of AI art. Christie’s sold it for more than $430,000. The work wasn’t really made by AI. It was generated by a type of algorithm, and yes, there’s a difference, but it’s not worth getting…