A poet, a painter, a sculptor, and a robot – Ai-Da, the first ultra-realistic humanoid artist introduced in 2019, has become the first robot to paint as artists have painted for centuries.
For Ai-Da's creators, however, the point isn't to have made an extremely capable robotic artist. They want to open up a conversation about how far, as a society, we're willing to develop robots and how we want to interact with them.
In a small room at London's British Library, Ai-Da's robotic arm moves slowly, with brush clamped firmly in bionic hand. She also has an incredibly realistic woman's face, complete with blinking eyes scanning the room, with the hand dipping into a paint palette, then making slow, deliberate strokes across the paper.
The scene, as Aidan Meller, the creator of Ai-Da described, is "mind-blowing" and "groundbreaking" stuff.
It usually takes more than five hours for Ai-Da to complete a painstaking work, with AI algorithms prompting her to interrogate, select and make decisions. No two artworks are exactly the same.
Yet the question Meller wants to raise with this, the first public demonstration of a creative robotic painting, is a dilemma in the art world: can Ai-Da's creations be considered art? For now, it's not only "can robots make art?" but rather "do we humans really want them to make it?"
"We haven't spent eye-watering amounts of time and money to make a very clever painter," said Meller. "This project is an ethical project."
If we can directly ask Ai-Da – just like the Guardian did – for some pre-submitted questions for her to answer, we may have a glimpse of what she thinks of art. She told that she used machine learning to teach her to paint, "which is different to humans."
Can she paint from imagination? "I like to paint what I see. 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."
What about appreciating art or beauty? Ai-Da said she doesn't have emotions like humans, do, "however, it is possible to train machine learning system to learn to recognize emotional facial expressions."
You may see more of Ai-Da's new painting work in her solo exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which opens to the public on 22 April. Titled 'Leaping into the Metaverse', the exhibition will explore the interface between human experience and AI technology, and draw a picture of the future of humanity in a world where AI technology continues to encroach on everyday human life.
However, as Meller noticed, Ai-Da – named after the computing pioneer Ada Lovelace – exists as a "comment and critique" on rapid technological change. With the amount of data we freely give about ourselves, AI algorithms "are going to know you better than you do", he warned.
We are entering a world, he said, "not understanding which is human and which is machine". Ai-Da's exhibition is not for promoting robots or technology, "We are deeply concerned about the nature of what this technology can do."
And for Ai-Da, she already has answers to some questions. "If art means communicating something about who we are and whether we like where we are going, then I am an artist," she said. "To be an artist is to illustrate the world around you."
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