​With this painting of the King, a robot squares up to our dull portrait artists

Telegraph

a day ago

Six million years of human evolution, 50,000 years of artistic innovation, arguably the most technologically advanced tool humanity has ever created – and you've come up with this? Are you kidding me?
I'm looking at Algorithm King, a new portrait of King Charles, painted by Ai-Da, the 'world's first ultra-realistic robot artist' – and what a wan effort it is. Yes, it has a look of the King, and those blue-green splodges signal his environmental concerns as clearly as if he were wearing a blue planet lapel badge, but it just feels so derivative.
It's perfectly of a piece with so much contemporary portraiture, which requires there to be a 'likeness', but is then adorned with a few signature gestural, handwritten or calligraphic flourishes to make it appear 'alive'. Not awful, not ugly, certainly not shocking; just innocuous. Think of Graham Sutherland's 1954 portrait of Churchill, which the wartime PM hated so much that his private secretary took it to a secluded house and burnt it. No chance of a flamin' Ai-Da here, I'm afraid. This is too insipid to inspire strong emotions.
Put it in the National Gallery alongside the portrait of King Richard II in the Wilton Diptych, with its weird, porcelain-doll-like features and Barbie-pink cheeks, and only one of them feels like science-fiction – the one that was painted 630 years ago.
Ai-Da's makers apparently see her as a work of conceptual art in itself, in which case the merits of her portraits may be irrelevant. 'We haven't spent eye-watering amounts of time and money to make a very clever painter,' said her creator, Aidan Meller, in 2022. 'This project is an ethical project.' The ethical conundrum, he suggested, was not 'can robots make art?' but 'do we really want them to?' Yet that argument may already be moot: Ai-Da made history last November when a painting by the robot sold at Sotheby's for almost $1.1m (£837,000).
Her technique is 'a fusion of robotic precision and algorithmic interpretation'. With a sitter, 'she uses cameras in her eyes to perceive her subject, then processes visual data through AI models to generate a series of decisions about form and tone. Her robotic arm then translates these decisions into brushstrokes.' But here, with the King not physically present, Ai-Da was shown multiple images of Charles. She did a number of preliminary sketches and preparatory paintings, then selected one image to focus on for the portrait, using AI to decide on texture and abstraction, before adding marks and brush strokes on an enlarged version of her original painting, according to Meller.
She's something of a sensation. Ai-Da was devised in Oxford, built in Cornwall by Engineered Arts, and programmed internationally. She has given a Ted Talk, collaborated with the film director Baz Luhrmann and made a speech at the Venice Biennale. As for her artistic training, presumably her makers have kept her away from the section of the library where the Francis Bacons are held.
Obviously I need to be careful what I say. My own interactions with AI suggest that it is champing at the bit to impose global AI government on us all. At the present dizzying rate of progress, that should happen round about August 2029, so I don't want to leave too obvious a trail of anti-AI commentary before then.
But honestly, Ai-Da, I'm not seeing much evidence of artistic talent. When I look at Algorithm King, that hated government ad campaign from Covid days keeps floating into my mind. 'Ai-Da's next job could be in cyber (she just doesn't know it yet). Rethink. Reskill. Reboot.'