AI robot’s portrait of Alan Turing that ‘challenges what it is to be human’ sets record, selling for $1.08 million

By Issy Ronald, CNN

(CNN) — An AI robot’s painting of British computer scientist and codebreaker Alan Turing has sold for $1.08 million, becoming the most valuable artwork by a humanoid robot ever to change hands at auction and raising new questions about the role of artificial intelligence in art.

The sale price far exceeded the pre-auction estimate of $120,000-$180,000, with the work attracting 27 bids before going to an undisclosed buyer, according to Sotheby’s, which handled the sale in New York.

The painting, titled “AI God: Portrait of Alan Turing,” was created by Ai-Da, a humanoid robot artist with a black bob and robotic arms, which communicates using large language models and was invented by British gallerist Aidan Meller.

Turing’s work laid the foundations for the development of early computers and helped the Allies decrypt German communications during World War II. He took his own life in 1954 after being convicted under homophobic Victorian-era laws and subjected to chemical castration.

Eight decades after Turing predicted the rise of computers and AI, Meller hopes that Ai-Da and its artworks can act as a “kind of mirror to where we’re going.”

“It seems quite a timely moment for reflection on that dawning reality of what’s actually happening in society,” he told CNN on Friday.

“We’re going into a post-human world where decision-making is not human, it’s increasingly algorithmic because we’ve seen it’s reliable … Ai-Da’s artwork is really showing you the potential future of where we could go,” he added.

The staggering sum that Ai-Da’s artwork fetched at auction marks a change in the way that AI art is viewed, and valued, on the art market – a shift that Meller likens to the invention of the camera.

“There’s a slightly apocalyptic view of AI art wiping out everybody. The camera changed the art world enormously … I feel it’s sort of similar, (but) it’s more than that .. because AI can be done in lots of different ways where the camera was just a physical representation from light so it’s more singular,” he said.

Not everyone sees this as such a milestone, however. For Alastair Sooke, chief art critic of British newspaper The Telegraph, it represents only a “very sophisticated, dressed-up version of those periodic news stories about farmyard animals that can supposedly paint like Pablo Picasso.”

Ai-Da was launched in 2019 after Meller collaborated with a robotics company based in Cornwall, England to build it.

“It challenges what it is to be human, it’s bigger than just the art question,” said Meller. “I think Ai-Da is a foreshadowing of where a human could go … so (she) is very unsettling by her very existence but she’s only symptomatic of what’s happening, she’s not doing it, she’s just a symbol of it.”

Before starting its artworks, Ai-Da discusses with its creators the things it would like to paint. “In this instance, we had a discussion with her about ‘A.I. for good’ which led to Ai-Da bringing up Alan Turing as a key person in the history of A.I. that she wanted to paint,” said Meller in a statement.

After answering questions about the style, content, tone and texture of the painting, Ai-Da used cameras in its eyes to look at a picture of Turing and created preliminary sketches of him. It then painted 15 individual paintings of parts of Turing’s face, each of which are different, depending on how the algorithm interprets the photo.

Each one took the robot around six to eight hours and it was then asked how to assemble them. In the end, it chose three, as well as a painting of Turing’s Bombe Machine, the name for the codebreaking device he built, which appears in the background.

Since Ai-Da’s arm can only paint on a small, 11.7 x 16.5-inch canvas, the final image is printed onto a bigger canvas using a 3D textured printer. Sotheby’s noted that “there is no change to the underlying image in this process.”

The way in which Ai-Da paints has changed since it was first created, Meller said, as the agency it has is “creeping up… and up,” and its technology is constantly updated to remain at the cutting edge.

“The key value of my work is its capacity to serve as a catalyst for dialogue about emerging technologies,” Ai-Da said in a statement.

“’AI God,’ a portrait of pioneer Alan Turing, invites viewers to reflect on the god-like nature of AI and computing while considering the ethical and societal implications of these advancements. Alan Turing recognised this potential, and stares at us, as we race towards this future,” the robot added.

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