Is It Art or Is It Memorex?

By Gordon Hopkins An artist recently had a work sold at a major auction house for the very first time. It would be a moment to make any artist proud. Except this artist, who does not feel pride because she does not feel anything.The artist's name is Ai-Da and she is an AI (artificial intelligence) powered robot. The artist described her painting thusly, “My artwork is a portrait of Alan Turing, the brilliant British mathematician who laid the foundation for modern computing and artificial intelligence. The portrait has a fractured and layered quality, reflecting our current, fragmented and multifaceted worlds.”This was the first time an AI-created painting has been sold by a major auction house. It had been expected to fetch somewhere between $120,000 and $180,000. That is a ridiculous amount for something created by a machine. Well, those estimates weren't even close. Instead, it sold for $1.1 million. That is an awful lot of cash for something that can't even blow it on a Maserati. For those more artistically informed who are wondering how this thing was created, physically, it was done with a 3-D printer. Ai-Da has a robotic arm for painting but it has a limited reach. This piece is over 90 inches high. Now, those regular readers of this column already know my feelings on AI. But, to be fair, some folks will say it doesn't matter how art is created. Only the result matters.So, is it art? I suppose the jury is still out, but I will note that one art critic declared the painting “clunking and pedestrianly obvious.” No, AI can’t create anything original. Instead, an AI is “trained” by giving it access to human-created art, which is supposedly learns from. In fact, what AI really does is take bits of existing art and stitches them together in a patchwork quilt of other artists' work. It creates something that feels familiar because it IS familiar.Given this, a better criticism of Ai-Da's work might be, “derivative.”

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