A portrait of British mathematician Alan Turing was auctioned for nearly $ 1.1 million in November 2024, a surprisingly high amount for a painting whose creator was not an artist in the traditional sense, but a humanoid robot powered by artificial intelligence.
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The experiment was conceived by Aidan Meller, a former galistman who lives on the outskirts of Oxford, England, who worked with a team of almost 30 people to build the robot. In their latest appearances, the robot is dressed as a woman and is called AI-DA in honor of Ada Lovelace, the 19th century math recognized as the world’s first computer programmer.
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“I’m trying to adapt to this somewhat surreal moment,” Meller said in an interview, recalling the final moments of the sale.
The painting, which portrayed Turing as the God of Artificial Intelligence, was offered as part of Sotheby’s digital art sale and initially had a sales estimate between $ 120,000 and $ 180,000. He received more than 27 throws and was sold to an anonymous buyer from the United States.
Meller said the money raised from the sale of the painting, called “Ai God. Portrait of Alan Turing” (AI. Alan Turing portrait), would help finance new improvements in AI-DA design.
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“We reinvest everything in the project,” he said. “She is constantly being updated. She is already on her third arm for painting.”
It was not the first time that an AI work of art was sold on auction. In 2018, Christie’s sold a painting made with an algorithm for a French startup for $ 432,500. The artist Refik Anadol sold several works “Machine Hallucration” made with artificial intelligence for millions of dollars during the boom of NFTs in 2021.
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Meller originally asked to create something for a conference on artificial intelligence organized by the United Nations this year. The robot replied suggesting painting a portrait of Turing as an example of someone who predicted the power of AI technology in the 1950s.
But the process of finalizing the work was more complex. The AI-DA program interpreted a Turing photograph and produced 15 individual paintings based on different parts of his face. The robot chose three of the portraits, along with a painting that made the Machine Bombe, the large device that Turing and other deciphering used to decode figures generated by the Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine.
The works were then photographed and charged on a computer that used the AI-DA language model to decide the assembly of a single painting, which was then finished using a textured 3D printer; Studio assistants helped create a more realistic end product on the screen. Ai-da then added marks and textures to the portrait to complete it.
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Meller said that Ai-da should provoke discussions about the ethics of artificial intelligence and how technology is changing our definition of who-or what-can be an artist.
“This is agency transfer to these machines,” said Meller. “The work is saying that we are entering a time when we ask the algorithms about which partner we want, which work we want, even which babies we want.”
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