- Ai-Da takes more than five hours to make a painting, but no two works are exactly the same.
- She is almost daring you to say are you comfortable with this.
- We are not here to promote robots or technology.
Ai-robotic Da’s arm glides slowly, dipping into a paint palette and then making slow, methodical strokes over the paper in front of her with a brush clenched tightly in her bionic hand as reported by The Guardian.
Humanoid robot
This, according to Aidan Meller, the creator of the world’s first ultra-realistic humanoid robot, Ai-Da, is “mind-blowing” and “groundbreaking” stuff.
Camera eyes fixed on her subject, AI algorithms prompt Ai-Da to interrogate, select, decision-make and, ultimately, create a painting.
It’s painstaking work, taking more than five hours a painting, but no two works exactly the same.
But rather “now that robots can make art, do we humans really want them to?”
“We haven’t spent eye-watering amounts of time and money to make a very clever painter,” said Meller.
AI
With rapidly developing artificial intelligence, growing accessibility to supercomputers and machine learning on the up, Ai-Da – named after the computing pioneer Ada Lovelace – exists as a “comment and critique” on rapid technological change.
Ask Ai-Da – and yes, the Guardian did ask pre-submitted questions for her to answer – what she thinks of art, her sophisticated language program is like Siri on steroids.
“You can paint from imagination, I guess if you have an imagination.
I have been seeing different things to humans as I do not have consciousness,” she responded in a stilted fashion.
The artists she most admires are Yoko Ono, Doris Salcedo, Michelangelo and Wassily Kandinsky.
World premiere
But, can what she creates be truly considered art?
“The answer to that question depends on what you mean by art,” she said, adding: “I am an artist if art means communicating something about who we are and whether we like where we are going.”
Devised in Oxford by Meller, Ai-Da was created more than two years ago by a team of programmers, roboticists, art experts and psychologists, completed in 2019, and is updated as AI technology improves.
She has already demonstrated her ability to sketch and create poems.
Her new painting talent was unveiled ahead of the world premiere of her solo exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which opens to the public on 22 April.
A new world
Soon, with the amount of data we freely give about ourselves, and through talking to our phones, computers, cars and even kitchen appliances, AI algorithms “are going to know you better than you do”, Meller warned.
We are entering a world, he said, “not understanding which is human and which is a machine”.
“What better thing to have a technological robot artist saying: ‘Hang on, are you happy with me doing this?’
She is almost daring you to say are you comfortable with this.
We are not here to promote robots or technology.
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Source: The Guardian
