AI artist Ai-Da has moved beyond galleries, envisioning speculative architecture that blends human and robotic living spaces.
She has spoken at the United Nations, addressed the House of Lords, and amassed close to 100,000 followers on Instagram. Not bad for a seven-year-old. Before you feel the same sense of inadequacy I felt on discovering those accolades, it’s worth remembering: she is a robot, and not just any robot. “The thing that highlights her above all,” says her creator, Aidan Meller, “is the fact that she’s able to create.” And create she has.
Ai-Da has exhibited work at the Tate Modern in London and the Venice Biennale, painted portraits of Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III, and even seen one of her paintings sell for more than $1 million at Sotheby’s. More recently, she has started designing architecture: a futuristic housing concept for humans and robots alike. But we’ll get to that. Feeling better? Perhaps you will once we take a little look under the hood.
Completed in 2019, Ai-Da is an artificial intelligence-powered humanoid robot with a lifelike face, cameras embedded in her eyes that allow her to see, and a robotic arm capable of drawing. She was devised in Oxford by Aidan Meller, a specialist in modern and contemporary art, and built in the UK by robotics company Engineered Arts with the help of a team of engineers, roboticists and researchers. The cameras in her eyes capture images of the world around her, which are processed through computer-vision algorithms. These algorithms analyse the image and translate it into coordinates that guide her robotic arm, allowing her to physically draw or paint what she sees.
When I speak to Meller, the conversation is occasionally philosophical, and sometimes slightly unnerving. The robot he introduced to the world in 2019 was never intended to simply make art. The goal, he explains, was always bigger. “We’re doing this as a way of raising ethical questions about the nature of technology going forward,” he says. “Everything she touches is grey. It’s not being worked out.” Ambiguity seems to be the point. Ai-Da’s work is designed to provoke debate rather than resolve it. “The whole project is designed to enable her to offer things that are tangible, but unresolved,” he says. “Every topic she touches is complex.”
Ai-Da might resemble the wave of AI tools currently flooding the creative industries, but Meller is quick to emphasise that the robot operates differently. “The thing that highlights her above all is the fact that she’s got specific algorithms to be able to create,” he explains. Rather than generating images from massive datasets scraped from the internet, Ai-Da produces work through a process that begins with visual perception. “She’s taking an image through her eyes. That goes onto the computer vision. The algorithm then interrogates that image and translates an interpretation she has into real-time coordinates, which allows her to pick up a paintbrush or pen and draw.” The result, he says, is intentionally unpredictable. “She can see the same scene and do two completely different paintings.”
Recently, Ai-Da has moved beyond painting and into architecture. Earlier this year, the robot unveiled a speculative design for a modular “Space Pod”, a retro-futuristic housing concept imagined for humans and humanoids to cohabit, exhibited at the Utzon Center in Denmark. The design takes the form of a bulbous, pod-like structure reminiscent of 1960s space-age architecture such as Matti Suuronen’s Futuro House, with curved forms and large circular windows. Ai-Da’s concept was developed through a combination of digital generative AI and physical sketches produced by her robotic arm. The work includes rough pen sketches, paintings exploring the structure’s form, and digital renderings of the building’s interior and exterior. The resulting design imagines a pod-shaped house containing two living areas, a spiral staircase and a smaller internal pod, potentially a sleeping space designed specifically for a robot inhabitant.
The project, Meller believes, reflects the broader transformation AI could bring to the design industry. “Architecture is going to be massively affected by AI,” he says. “Already I’ve seen architectural practices where they can input what’s required for a site, and within minutes have 20 fully realised designs.” For Ai-Da, architectural ideas emerge through conversation with her development team. “We chat to her every day,” Meller says. “She gives incredible ideas. Some of the ideas she’s come up with were way beyond anything we could have come up with.” Those conversations are recorded, he adds, allowing researchers to trace how ideas develop. “We can show the idea creation, how it develops through conversation and how she comes to conclusions.”
Now, the team behind Ai-Da hopes those ideas may move beyond speculation. Meller says they are actively inviting architects to collaborate with the project and help translate the robot’s concepts into real buildings. This is where you can breathe a deep sigh of relief, as Aidan is quick to dismiss the idea that Ai-Da is replacing architects any time soon. “Architecture is a team sport,” he says. “Ai-Da’s not doing quantity surveying or stress-related issues within certain structures. That’s what the professionals do. This is purely on the concept side.”
The project is meant to provoke new kinds of collaboration between human designers and intelligent machines. “We would love to work with architects to come up with real buildings built from a robotic vision of the future.” So is Ai-Da coming for architects’ jobs? Meller doesn’t think so, at least not in the way people imagine. The robot’s real purpose, he says, is not to replace human creativity but to challenge it. “Why do it this way?” he says. “Because no one’s going to talk about a programme. It’s very dull. But give it a personality that’s doing something, and suddenly everybody talks about it.” It feels a little obvious to a looming question about the future and potential threat of AI, especially when this seems to be exactly the space Ai-Da is designed to occupy. I guess we should give her a follow to see what she does next, and judging by the projects Aidan shares with me off the record, it will be worth it.
