The world’s first robot artist discusses beauty, Yoko Ono and the perils of AI

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. A Rembrandt self-portrait expresses his humanity. Ai-Da’s art, if that’s what it is, cannot do that. Plus, Ai-Da is only two years old so what does she know about anything?

‘This is the first self-portraitist without a self,’ says Aidan Meller, the gallerist who created Ai-Da along with more than a dozen engineers, art historians and artificial intelligence specialists. Ai-Da was designed by the English robotics company Engineered Arts, from Cornwall, using the same technology responsible for the robots in the TV series Westworld. Her robotic hands were developed by engineers in Leeds.

Meller won’t tell me how much Ai-Da cost to build, but some of her funding came from the EU’s Creative Europe programme — a fact that will reinforce everything Brexiteers and Remainers have always thought about the EU.