Is AI the future of art?

To many they are art's next big thing: Digital images of jellyfish pulsing and blurring in a dark pink sea, or dozens of butterflies fusing together into a single organism.

The Argentine artist Sofia Crespo, who created the works with the help of artificial intelligence, is part of the "generative art" movement, where humans create rules for computers which then use algorithms to generate new forms, ideas and patterns.

The field has begun to attract huge interest among art collectors, and even bigger price tags at auction.

U.S. artist and programmer Robbie Barrat, a prodigy still only 22 years old, sold a work called "Nude Portrait#7Frame#64" at Sotheby's in March for 630,000 ($821,000).

That came almost four years after French collective Obvious sold a work at Christie's titled "Edmond de Belamy," largely based on Barrat's code, for $432,500.

Collector Jason Bailey told AFP that generative art was "like a ballet between humans and machines."

But the nascent scene could already be on the verge of a major shake-up, as tech companies begin to release AI tools that can whip up photo-realistic images in seconds.

Artists in Germany and the United States blazed a trail in computer-generated art during the 1960s.

The V&A museum in London keeps a collection going back more than half a century, one of the key works being a 1968 piece by German artist Georg Nees called "Plastik 1."

Nees used a random number generator to create a geometric design for his sculpture.

Nowadays, digital artists work with supercomputers and systems known as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create images far more complex than anything Nees could have dreamed of.

GANs are sets of competing Ais, one generates an...