Like a slippery politician on the Today programme, the world’s first robot artist answers the questions she wants rather than the ones she’s been asked. I never had this trouble with Tracey Emin or Maggi Hambling.
As we stand before a display of her paintings at London’s Design Museum, I ask Ai-Da whether she thinks her self-portraits are beautiful. What I want to get at, you see, is that, while it’s quite possible for a machine to make something beautiful, it’s hardly comprehensible for a thing made from metal, algorithms and circuitry to appreciate that beauty.
‘I want to see art as a means for us to become more aware of what’s going on in our lives. Art is a way to come together and a way to address problems. Art begins a conversation. It is a group effort.’
What nonsense. Art isn’t social policy by other means. It is better understood, surely, as an expression of human subjectivity and can therefore be regarded as the last redoubt against our takeover by machines.
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