Artist Ai-Da: a humanoid robot prepares for his first solo exhibition

Oxford, England ( original article on Thomson Reuters ) - in a white blouse and with flowing black hair, Ai-Da at work looks like any artist, studying nature and putting a pencil on paper. However, the sound of a moving bionic arm betrays the nature of the Ai-Da robot.

Described as “the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid robot artist with AI,” Ai-Da next week opens its first solo exhibition of eight drawings, twenty paintings, four sculptures and two video works.

“She brings a new voice to the world of art,” says its inventor and gallery owner in the UK, Aidan Meller, “It's very important to focus on this“ voice ”of technologies, because they affect each of us,” he told Reuters on a preview of the work.

- We have a clearly defined question that we want to study. It includes the benefit and harm of today's AI, because the next decade is already on the threshold and we are focused on deducing the ethical norms of this issue.

Named after the British mathematician and computer technology pioneer Ada Lovelace, Ai-Da can draw from life thanks to the cameras in her eyeballs and AI algorithms created by Oxford University scientists. Algorithms help calculate coordinates for her hand to create a masterpiece.

Ai-Da uses a pencil or pen for sketching, but its main purpose is to make and paint ceramics. Her works are now printed on canvas, on top of which a man also wrote.

“From the coordinates in the drawing, we were able to obtain an algorithm, which, in turn, can output the coordinates through the Cartesian graph, which then creates the final image,” says Meller, “It’s really an exciting process that has never been executed the way we did ... We do not know exactly what the pictures will look like, that is the meaning.

The “Declassified Future” exhibition features drawings that pay homage to Lovelace and mathematics to Alan Turing, abstract pictures of trees, bee sculptures based on Ai-Da drawings and videos, one of which, “Privacy”, pays homage to Yoko Ono “Cut Piece” 1965

The creation of Ai-Da was completed in April, and she had already seen how her creations were sold out.

“It was an auction for over a million pounds of sold works of art,” says Moeller.

The exhibition, which opens on June 12 in the Barn Gallery at St. John’s College, is devoted to the interaction between technology, AI and organic life.
To Möller’s question about “all AIs running at the moment,” Ai-Da responds with a programmed speech:

- New technologies carry the potential for good and evil. This is a big responsibility - to restrain the negative possibilities of their use, we all need to keep this in mind.

Report by Matthew Stock; written by Marie-Louise Gumuchian, edited by Hugh Lawson.

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