$1.1 million for this? Sotheby’s AI Alan Turing portrait leaves me utterly cold
Although, beneath that natty bob, Ai-Da, the world’s “first ultra-realistic robot” artist, is made of wires, motherboards, and processors, “she” – if, indeed, this is the automaton’s preferred pronoun – has enjoyed a career that most flesh-and-blood artists can only dream of.
Since she was created, in 2019, a torrent of press releases has inundated my inbox, informing me of her global peregrinations and success: addressing a House of Lords committee, exhibiting beside the Great Pyramid at Giza, and producing woeful, irrelevant portraits of Glastonbury’s headliners and the late Queen. I can never help wondering if her career would have taken off in quite the same way had her inventors – who include a bunch of boffins from the universities of Oxford and Birmingham – not provided her with a prosthetic head resembling an attractive young woman.
Now, a painting by Ai-Da has sold at auction for almost $1.1 million (£837,000). And I cannot describe how cold the news leaves me.
The work in question is a portrait of the British computer scientist Alan Turing – a subject that, according to Aidan Meller, director of the Ai-Da Robot Project, Ai-Da came up with herself, using her AI algorithms and AI language model, having been prompted (somewhat leadingly, one must say) with the phrase “AI for good”. Makes sense, right? Of course an AI robo-artist would like to paint the father of AI.
Yet, as an artistic choice, this is already clunking and pedestrianly obvious – and that’s before we consider the series of 15 “mixed media” paintings, “using” acrylic and oil, which Ai-Da apparently produced with her camera-eyes and robotic painting arm, after she’d worked on a series of preliminary ink sketches of Turing like a good little 19th-century student at the École des Beaux-Arts adhering to time-honoured methods.
In the large, 90.5in-high portrait that was sold at Sotheby’s – which, Meller explains, was “printed using a 3D textured printer” (because her painting arm is “limited” to an A3-sized canvas), before “studio assistants” (hang on, were they also robots?) added “texture” – dingy, ghoulish, seemingly pixelated but immediately recognisable fragments of Turing’s face appear to float, like scraps of defunct debris, against a void as dark as outer space.
This unexceptional, sub-Francis-Bacon image is then randomly enlivened with a few swirling marks and a handful of colourful blobs – two blue, one yellow (like an errant tennis ball), and a couple of artificial white highlights intended, I assume, to animate Turing’s coaly eyes.
Sotheby’s insists that this represents a “significant milestone in both art and AI”, and perhaps it is, when it comes to the latter (I have no expertise as a computer engineer). But a milestone in art? No way. This is a very sophisticated, dressed-up version of those periodic news stories about farmyard animals that can supposedly paint like Pablo Picasso.