- [Michael] We're about to meet an artist unlike any other
in the world.
- Hello there, I am Ai-Da.
I am the world's first ultra-realistic AI robot artist.
- [Michael] Ai-Da is definitely a robot.
- I do not have feelings.
- [Michael] Ai-Da may not have feelings herself,
but she has prompted a fierce conversation in the art world
about what art is and who can make it
and that's the point behind the whole thing.
- I think a good artist encourages people
to reimagine and think more carefully about their world.
- Her creators say if that's all she's able to do,
then the project, whether you like it or not,
will have been a success.
(upbeat music)
Ai-Da lives in a stately home outside of London
with Aidan Meller, the mastermind behind the project
and Lucy Seal, the project's curator.
- I had a really bizarre moment.
I was in the gallery.
I had several works of Picasso, Matisse to my right
and I had Turner and Constable to my left.
And I had a radically unpleasant thought
and that is that actually technically some
of these works weren't that good.
It led me to the question that I then became obsessed with.
What is it about that 1% of artists
that go on a massive, global scale compared
to the 99% of artists that don't?
Three months in, I got nowhere.
I went down to my partner.
I said, "This isn't working."
And she rather obtusely, she said,
"Well, that's because you're not asking
"the right questions clearly."
And she was right.
Don't look at the art and artists.
Look at their context, look at the society they were in.
They caught the zeitgeist of their time.
I thought, well, what's gonna happen
in the next five to 10 years?
There was one thing they were consistent on
and that was the role and rise of AI.
So I thought, that's it.
- The Ai-Da robot project is an art project
and the aim is to get people thinking
and considering their futures.
We have based the project around the early 20th century
where there's a building tension.
And although the 21st century is completely different
to the early 20th century, we're also
in a similar time of rapid technological change
where we don't exactly know where some
of those forces are going to go and how they're going
to play out.
And so we want to really celebrate the good side.
So there you have Ai-Da in some ways a celebration.
The drawings she produces are quite unsettling.
They're very fragmented and splintered.
- The robot works by processing an existing image
through the AI, then putting her pencil to paper
to create the original piece.
The reference image can be virtually anything.
She has cameras in her eyes so she can draw what she sees
or you upload an image of something or someone else.
In this instance, she's drawing her interpretation
of an existing image of Michelangelo.
When she's finished, these are either presented
as completed works or they're used as coordinates
for more intricate pieces when a human ultimately makes
the brush strokes based on her original vision.
You might be surprised by how interpretive it is.
But according to Aidan and Lucy, that's by design.
The technical team worked to actually program creativity
into Ai-Da.
They determined that her works had to be new,
surprising, and of value.
And by those measures,
Aidan and Lucy feel like they were successful.
And while a machine being creative
may sound counterintuitive,
that debate has mostly been put to bed.
The power and potential of AI is that it is creative.
It can learn on its own and evolve.
That aside, you may be left with this nagging feeling
of, well, it just doesn't look very impressive
or I don't like it.
But Lucy and Aidan are quick to remind us
that creating good art, however you want to define it,
was not their intent with the project.
The purpose of Ai-Da is to encourage conversations
around the rise of advanced tech like AI
and grapple with how it will impact different industries,
like say art.
- Mirroring our fears and our insights
and thoughts is a very good way to contemplate it.
That's why we think this voice of Ai-Da is so important
because she's hopefully gonna provoke
and instill more debate and more considerations.
Are we gonna actually use these technologies
to actually make a better world?
- Whether you like the robot, are disturbed by it,
or scoff at it, that's all part and parcel
with the experience.
I found myself at times growing cynical.
Ai-Da has sold more than a million dollars worth of art.
If you have a robot that can create something
of real value over and over again basically forever,
without worrying about mental or physical fatigue,
maybe all the other stuff is just a smoke screen
to the real story,
which is they've just created a golden goose.
But then you realize that is an important question.
What does it mean when we share the world
with robots that can outpace human productivity
and perhaps eventually creativity?
It is something we should be thinking about.
- Robots are going to be doing all sorts
of different jobs that currently humans do
and so that makes people very uncomfortable.
Therefore, they want as a blank policy,
I don't want this.
It's really our response to that.
We can be dystopic about it
and say it's gonna make it worse.
We would hope that Ai-Da's voice addressing these issues
will enable us to actually engage with it more
rather than run away from it.
We think that she's the beginning of something
which is gonna be much much bigger in the future.
Thanks for coming on this journey with us to meet Aida.
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