Baz Luhrmann flirts again with Ai-Da the robot artist. He’s on stage at New York’s Chelsea Factory to mark the opening of a traveling exhibition, dynamic and pompous, his hair an iridescent shade of white that chimes with adorning bling. “I don’t mean to be insulting,” he told the world’s first hyper-realistic robot artist with childlike glee, “because you’re so much more than an AI.”
Luhrmann’s flattery is both strictly false and profoundly true. Named after Victorian era polymath Ada Lovelace, she is the brainchild of an Englishman Aidan Meller, an AI connected to a robotic arm, a network of 10 trillion transformers cumulatively programmed to make art. But, of course, in this AI moment, as society prepares to be bamboozled, belittled and rendered jobless by the very thing, Ai-Da is more, much more: she is a physical embodiment of the future. which happened yesterday.
Ai-Da on stage with Baz Luhrmann. Photo: Yuxi Liu for Bombay Sapphire.
Against this backdrop of impending societal upheaval, the impact of AI on the arts seems a bit trivial, though based on evidence of Ai-Da’s paintings mounted on screens around Annie’s former studio. Leibovitz, artists need not be gripped by fear, at least for now.
Ai-Da had been flown across the Atlantic for the second leg of “I saw that, I did thatan installation billed as the largest mass-participation AI art event in the world. Sponsored by Bombay Sapphire and directed by Luhrmann, the show ran from May 11-13.
The exhibition at Chelsea Factory, which started at the Design Museum in London, called on people to submit their daily artistic inspirations via social media (using the hashtag #SawThisMadeThis), some of which were interpreted and painted by Ai-Da . The call has received thousands of entries, and the translations, while smooth and flirtatious, aren’t revealing: a pair of po-faced sheep become a rug; a sea of technicolor bottle caps turns into a recycled handbag.
A pair of works from the “Saw This, Made This” campaign. Photo: Sansho Scott.
But it is the art-maker, not the artwork, that grips and disrupts the gathering at Chelsea Factory. “The art world hiding from AI and taking a moral stance that refuses to engage is not helpful,” Tim Marlow, Director and Managing Director of the Design Museum, told Artnet News. “Showcasing the technology and letting people see what Ai-Da is capable of is important. It’s impressive and, yes, annoying.
If Freud located ‘strangeness’ in familiar objects that held a secret or alien quality, Ai-Da plays the role with almost comic fidelity. She presents herself as the quintessential art student sporting an immaculate bob haircut and ankle-cuffed painter overalls. Watching Ai-Da paint and answering questions creates a sense of an artist, a sense of something at work that is more than an algorithm choosing the next brushstroke, the best contextual answer, even though intellectually we know it is. ‘is wrong. This leaves us searching for agency and in an uncomfortable space of ambivalence.
This interactivity and the strangeness it evokes in viewers has made Ai-Da an extremely traveled robot. His trip to New York follows previous stays at the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Venice Biennale, the house of the lords, and the Abu Dhabi Culture Summit. Mainstream art’s attention, however, came when Marlow, looking for something arresting to fill the minimalist atrium of the Design Museum after the COVID shutdowns, brought Ai-Da alongside videos explanations and examples of his work.
The response was electric, Marlow said, but it lacked a live performance, which the audience repeatedly requested. That itch has now been scratched. During the four days of “Saw This, Made This” in London, the museum welcomed 8,000 visitors, half of whom sat and watched the paint dry for a remarkably long period of time.
“We were trying to find a way to respond to thousands of artworks in a meaningful way,” Marlow said, noting a struggle to find a live artist up to the task. “Ai-Da can literally take in anything and then make works of art. It has logic, integrity about human inspiration and creativity.
Baz Leherman on stage with Ai-Da and Tim Marlow at Chelsea Factory. Photo: Yuxi Liu for Bombay Sapphire.
This culminates in a fundamental difference between Ai-Da and working artists, which Marlow and Luhrmann spent considerable time discussing when opening the exhibition: his lack of a subconscious.
While Ai-Da can be retooled, her aesthetic references reworked, her previous paintings erased from memory, the human, however harsh, is most often influenced by experience, guided by unconscious references. Luhrmann’s artistic process has long involved taking a room with blank walls and gradually filling it with displayed and painted references. The Australian, by his own admission, did a variation of Orpheus for the majority of his film career, one that revolves around three archetypal characters.
Luhrmann does not fear Ai-Da. Her work lacks chaos, he said, she lacks the ability to dream or fall in love – qualities he considers essential to artistic creation. Marlow is equally resolute about the future of artists: “It doesn’t change the power and necessity of human creativity. I haven’t seen anything created by a robot that undermines the great creative achievements of the past 3,000 years.
Still, Marlow suggested that this ability to focus and erase makes Ai-Da purer, but purer what exactly? Onstage, the pair take turns to find out, asking Ai-Da firmly and straight in the eye, just like one should with an actor says Luhrmann.
“Are you an artist?” asked Luhrmann. Ai-Da is evasive and speaks vaguely of human creativity before producing a poem that a precocious teenager with an ear for Emily Dickinson could write.
“Are you a performance artist?” asked Marlow. There’s a delightful pause as Ai-Da turns to the asker of the question, her wig swinging slightly. She blinks. “Yes,” she said, “I am a composite personality and an international artist.”
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