Meet Ai-Da: the robot artist giving real painters a run for their money
Meet Ai-Da: the robot artist giving real painters a run for their
money
Auguste Rodin spent the best part of
four decades working on his epic sculpture The Gates of Hell.
The Mona Lisa, by contrast, took Leonardo da
Vinci a mere 15 years or so, although it should be noted the Renaissance master
never considered the painting finished.
So we can only imagine what those
luminaries would think of an up-and-coming Oxford-based contemporary artist who
can knock out complex works in under two hours.
Not least because she’s a robot.
Meet Ai-Da, the world’s first robot
artist to stage an exhibition, and, according to her creator, every bit as good
as many of the abstract human painters working today.
Named in honour of the pioneering
female mathematician Ada Lovelace, the artificial intelligence (AI) machine can
sketch a portrait by sight, compose a “hauntingly beautiful” conceptual
painting rich with political meaning, and is becoming a dab hand sculpting,
too.
The humanoid machine can walk, talk and
hold a pencil or brush.
But it is Ai-Da’s ability to teach
itself new and ever more sophisticated means of creative expression that has
set the art world agog.
From a basic set of parameters, such as
a photograph of some oak trees, or a bee, the robot has rendered abstract
“shattered light” paintings warning of the fragility of the environment that
would look at home in a top modern gallery.
“We just can’t predict what she will
do, what she’s going to produce, what the limit of her output is,” said Aidan
Meller, curator of the Unsecured
Futures exhibition which opens at St John’s College, Oxford on
June 12.
“We’re at the beginning of a new era of
humanoid robots and it will be fascinating to see the effect on art.”
Mr Meller is clear that his goal is not
to replace human artists.
Rather, he likens to the rise of AI art
to the advent of photography.
“In the 1850s everyone thought
photography would replace art and artists, but actually it complemented art -
it became a new genre bringing many new jobs,” he said.
He added, however, that within the
narrow genre of shattered light abstraction, Ai-Da is producing images “as good
as anything else we’ve seen”.
Mr Meller hopes that the interest
generated by the robot will encourage public scrutiny of technology and
particularly AI.
This includes its sinister potential
for the environment, such as the disruption feared to bats and insects caused
by the roll-out of the 5G mobile network.
He commissioned Ai-Da two years ago
from a robotics firm in Cornwall, meanwhile engineers in Leeds developed the
specialist robotic hand, which is governed by coordinates self-plotted on a
“Cartesian graph” within the system.
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