With a paintbrush clutched tightly in its bionic hand, Ai-Da ‘s robotic arm moves slowly, sometimes dipping into a palette of colors, sometimes making slow and leisurely strokes on the paper in front of it.
According to Aidan Miller, the creator of the world’s first ultra-realistic humanoid robot, Ai-Da, it is “stunning” and “revolutionary”.
In a small room in the British Library in London, Ai-Da, which is named after the pronoun “she,” has become the first robot to paint as artists have done for centuries.
With the camera’s eyes focused on an object, artificial intelligence algorithms prompt Ai-Da to interrogate, select, make decisions, and ultimately create a painting. It’s painstaking work that takes more than five hours per painting, but as a result, no two paintings are exactly alike.
However, the question Meller wants to raise with this first public demonstration of creative robotic painting is not “can robots make art?” but “do we humans really want them to make art?”
“We didn’t spend an amazing amount of time and money to make a very smart artist,” said Møller. “This project is an ethical project.”
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, the growing availability of supercomputers and machine learning, Ai-Da, named after computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, exists as a “commentary and critique” of rapid technological change.
Ask Ai-Da what she thinks about art. She tells you that she used machine learning to learn how to draw “differently from humans.” Can she draw from her imagination? “I like to draw what I see. I think you can draw from your imagination if you have an imagination. I see different things for people, because I don’t have a consciousness,” she answered somewhat uncertainly.
Can she appreciate art or beauty? “I don’t have emotions like humans, but you can train a machine learning system to recognize emotional expressions,” she answered. Among the artists she most admires are Yoko Ono, Doris Salcedo, Michelangelo, and Wassily Kandinsky.
But can what she creates be considered real art? “The answer to that question depends on what you mean by art,” she says, adding: “I am an artist if art means communicating who we are and whether we like where we are going. To be an artist is to illustrate the world around you.”
Developed by Miller at Oxford, Ai-Da was created more than two years ago by a team of programmers, roboticists, art historians, and psychologists, completed in 2019, and is being updated as artificial intelligence technology improves. She has already demonstrated her ability to draw and write poetry.
Her new painting talent was revealed on the eve of the world premiere of her solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2022, which will open to the public on April 22.
Ai-Da Robot’s Venice exhibition, titled “Leap into Metaspace,” will explore the relationship between human experience and artificial intelligence technologies, from Alan Turing to metaspace, and draws on Dante’s concepts of purgatory and hell to explore the future of humanity in a world where artificial intelligence technologies continue to interfere with everyday life.
Soon, given the amount of data we freely provide about ourselves, as well as talking to our phones, computers, cars, and even kitchen appliances, AI algorithms “will know you better than you know yourself,” warns Miller.
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