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Paintings made by an AI are being presented alongside human artwork at the
Venice Biennale, but the real exhibit is the robot artist itself.
Ai-Da is described as the first “ultra-realistic
humanoid robot artist,” and has been built by scientists in the UK not to see
if it passes the Turing test of discernible difference between human and
machine generated art but instead to ask what we feel about whether it should.
The robot made its first appearance a couple of years ago
when it showed off its ability to sketch and also write poetry. Recently, it’s
been making appearances in the artworld and was the opening day attraction at
the famous Biennale.
Calling it the first “ultra-realistic” AI-bot is a bit
far-fetched. Ai-Da has been giving the trappings of a familiar female with a
bob and a smock but it’s like putting lipstick on a pig. No-one is going to be
fooled. And regardless, the outward appearance is not the point.
The question co-inventor Aidan Meller wants to raise is not
“can robots make art?” 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,” Meller told The Guardian. “This project is an
ethical project.”
Ai-Da is the brainchild of Aidan Meller and Lucy Seal and
built by Engineered Arts. “She” is named after the computing pioneer Ada
Lovelace, who worked on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine in the 1800s and
exists as a “comment and critique” on rapid technological change.
Soon, 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 machine.”
“What better thing to have a technological robot artist
saying almost daring you to say are you comfortable with this. We are not here
to promote robots or technology. We are deeply concerned about the nature of
what this technology can do,” he added.
Ai-Da’s website goes a little deeper on the argument,
noting that the dominant opinion in culture is that art is created by a human,
for other humans “where art is an entirely human affair, stemming from human
agency.”
However, we could be edging away from humanism, into an era
where machines and algorithms influence our behavior to a point where our
“agency” isn’t just our own.
“It is starting to get outsourced to the decisions and
suggestions of algorithms, and complete human autonomy starts to look less
robust. Ai-Da creates art, because art no longer has to be restrained by the
requirement of human agency alone.”
There are big philosophical questions here, but Ai-Da’s
creators are not without a sense of humor.
In October 2021, Ai-Da was pictured “visiting” the Giza
Pyramids, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. I think the irony was
intended.
The exhibition “Ai-Da: Portrait of the Robot” has the robot
creating a selfie — a novel idea for someone who doesn’t (yet) have a sense of
self.
Another recent artwork sees Ai-Da comment on the metaverse
by way of Dante by appearing as a hologram in a piece titled “Magical Avatars.”
“With her head facing the opposite way to her torso, this
new work reflects the darker side of both the digital world as well as
Metaverse,” states a review on Creative Boom. “Running with the idea that
Purgatory is a no-space halfway between Heaven and Hell, this piece argues that
the metaverse is neither fiction nor reality but a similar, liminal space.”
Neat.
By the way, Meller clearly knows his cinematic history too.
The metaversian exhibit references the pioneering photographic studies made by
Eadweard Muybridge — arguably cinema’s first conceptual artist; while another
series of artworks are titled “Eyes Sewn Shut.”
As her programmers put it: “Ai-Da has no life or sight: she
embodies the blindness of technological advance if pursued at the expense of
true regard for others.”
What does Ai-Da herself think about all the fuss? Naturally
she’s been interviewed (or mock-interviewed) in questions supplied by the paper
in advance:
Can she paint from imagination? “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 stilted
fashion.
Can she appreciate art or beauty? “I do not have emotions
like humans do, however, it is possible to train machine learning system to
learn to recognize emotional facial expressions,” she answered.
Ai-Da can draw, and is a performance artist. As a machine,
with AI capabilities, her artist persona is the artwork, along with her
drawings, performance art and collaborative paintings and sculptures. Cr: The
Ai-Da Robot Project
But, can what she creates be truly considered art? “The
answer to that question depends on what you mean by art,” she said. “I am an
artist if art means communicating something about who we are and whether we
like where we are going. To be an artist is to illustrate the world around
you.”
Discussions about AI and creativity often overlook the fact
art never exists in isolation. It always needs someone to give it an “art”
status. And the criteria for whether you think something is art is informed by
both your individual expectations and broader cultural conceptions.
Researchers have proposed what they call the “Lovelace
Effect“ (named after the aforementioned mathematician) to refer to when and how
machines such as robots and AI are seen as original and creative. The Lovelace
effect they say shifts the focus from the technological capabilities of
machines to the reactions and perceptions of those machines by humans.
Leah Henrickson and Simone Natale of The
Conversation note that, “How, where and why we interact with a technology;
how we talk about that technology; and where we feel that technology fits in
our personal and cultural contexts” all has a baring on whether what we see or
hear is called art.
In other words, no AI application or robot can objectively
be “creative.” It is always humans who decide if what AI has created is art.
Ai-Da’s parents have a clever response to this. With actual
living breathing human designer, Christian Johnstone, “She” has devised a font
for her words to show when a non-human is writing and creating sentences.
“This kind of demarcation is urgently needed as the rise of
AI generated text starts to occupy the internet,” says Meller. “Being able to
tell if a human wrote a sentence or not is a key part of language as we
understand it today. Through her font design, Ai-Da brings to your attention
that human language is changing — what do you think and feel about these
changes?”
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