Ai-Da creates art – sort of

Ai-Da creates art – sort of

AI is increasing at ever fast rates and in all conceivable parts of our lives. We have commercially viable AI driving cars, AI that can identify pictures and elements in pictures, teach robots how to run/walk/jump and navigate, language bots that can write news and informational articles that are indistinguishable from real writers, comprehend and explain jokes, and even generate art.

Ai-Da is an AI enhanced robot created by Aidan Meller that generates art. It uses its cameras to observe, and then generate a variety of art based on what it sees. You can see her work on her instagram channel.

It appears that Ai-Da is likely just a camera, image filters much like you’d find in Photoshop, and a computer controlled limb to generate art using her robotic arm. The creators seem to also enjoy putting words into her mouth. Lots of them – even to the point of giving a Ted talk. It can come off a bit pretentious, and I even feels like there is a touch of deliberate misleading going on. Folks that don’t understand there is ‘someone behind the curtain’ pulling the strings and putting the words in her mouth might believe it’s the AI’s opinion – which it really isn’t.

Still, it’s an interesting accomplishment – I just wish the creators would be a bit more honest about what they’re doing and no try to convince people the AI itself is coming up with the words and that her artwork is more a product of well-known image algorithms as opposed to intelligence – let alone consciousness.

One thought on “Ai-Da creates art – sort of

  1. It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.

    The thing I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.

    I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.

    My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461

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