Could a Robot be the Next Picasso?

Ai-Da the Robot Artist Posing With One of her Paintings.

Robots may well create art, from who knows what motive, and enjoy it based on their own brand of aesthetics, satire (if they enjoy satire), or humor. We might enjoy it, too, especially if it’s evocative of work by human artists, if it appeals to our senses. Although, would we judge it differently?

An artificially-intelligent art-making robot named Ai-Da reached a milestone in its career: its first solo exhibition. The robot was created by British inventor Aidan Meller (who is also a gallerist), along with scientists at Oxford. The university scientists helped bestow Ai-Da with cameras in its eyes and artificial intelligence algorithms, which in turn dictate coordinates, allowing the robot’s arm to draw.

Meller added that Ai-Da’s forthcoming exhibition is “a sold out show with over a million pounds worth of artworks sold.” It’s unclear what share of those sales goes to Ai-Da. This also poses further questions such as who should be credited for the work and marketed around its image: the Robot or its engineer?

Many people feel, that whereas computers can excel in well-structured areas of problem solving like logic or algebra they will have little hope of ever producing truly creative work. For a work to be creative, it must be innovative which represents a challenge for computers. This is where I disagree and think that artificial intelligence and machine learning actually do have huge potential to drive a new generation of creativity.

Last year Google launched Magenta, a research project to explore how artificial intelligence can create art, and make that process easier for TensorFlow users. The group has about six researchers now, and will invite other academics to help try to solve the problem of creative machines.

Artificial intelligence has a long way to go before it can match the greatest painters of all times in creativity, but it seems they’ve gotten quite good at mimicking and remixing what they see. An interesting study published by researchers from the University of Tubingen in Germany, researchers described an artificial intelligence neural network capable of lifting the “style” of an image and using it to restyle another image, which is why these waterfront houses look as though they were painted by Picasso, van Gogh, or Munch.