AI algorithms prompt robots to interrogate, select, and make decisions to create a painting

With a brush clamped firmly in her bionic hand, Ai-Da’s robotic arm moves slowly. She dips into a paint palette and then makes slow, deliberate strokes across the paper in front of her.

According to Aidan Meller, the creator of the world’s first ultra-realistic humanoid robot, Ai-Da, this is “mind-blowing” and “groundbreaking.”

In a small room at London’s British Library, Ai-Da – assigned the she/her pronoun – has become the first robot to paint as artists have painted for centuries.

Camera eyes fixed on her subject, AI algorithms prompt Ai-Da to interrogate, select, make decisionsa, and, ultimately, create a painting. It’s painstaking work, taking more than five hours a paint, but with no two works the same.

Yet the question Meller wants to raise with this, the first public demonstration of a creative, robotic painting, is not “Can robots make art?”, but rather “Now that robots can make art, do we humans want them to?”

“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.”

With rapidly developing artificial intelligence, growing accessibility to supercomputers, and machine learning on the upswing, Ai–Da—named after the computing pioneer Ada Lovelace—exists as a “comment and critique” on rapid technological change.