Alan Turing's portrait of an AI robot that “challenges the human condition” sets a record with a sale price of $1.08 million

CNN
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British computer scientist and codebreaker Alan Turing's painting of an AI robot sold for $1.08 million, making it the most valuable work of art of a humanoid robot ever to change hands at auction and raising new questions about the role of the artificial intelligence in art.

The selling price was well above the pre-auction estimate of $120,000 to $180,000. According to Sotheby's, which handled the sale in New York, the work received 27 bids before it went to an undisclosed buyer.

The painting, titled “AI God: Portrait of Alan Turing,” was created by Ai-Da, a humanoid robot artist with a black bob and robotic arms who communicates using large language models and was invented by British gallerist Aidan Meller.

Turing's work laid the foundation for the development of early computers and helped the Allies decipher German communications during World War II. He took his own life in 1954 after being convicted and subjected to chemical castration under homophobic Victorian laws.

Eight decades after Turing predicted the rise of computers and AI, Meller hopes that Ai-Da and its artworks can serve as “a kind of mirror of where we are going.”

The humanoid AI robot defends criticism that it cannot be artistic

“It seems like a pretty timely time to think about the looming reality of what's actually happening in society,” he told CNN on Friday.

“We are entering a posthuman world where decision-making is no longer human but is increasingly algorithmic because we have seen that it is reliable… Ai-Das's artworks really show the potential future we could go to,” he added added.

The staggering sum that Ai-Da's artwork fetched at auction marks a shift in the way AI art is viewed and valued in the art market – a shift that Meller likens to the invention of the camera.

“There is a slightly apocalyptic view of AI art that wipes everyone out. “The camera has changed the art world tremendously…I feel like it's kind of similar, (but) it's more than that…because AI can be implemented in many different ways where the camera was just a physical representation of light , so it's more unique,” he said.

However, not everyone sees this as such a milestone. For Alastair Sooke, chief art critic of the British newspaper The Telegraph, it is just a “very sophisticated, dressed-up version of those regular news reports about farm animals who supposedly can paint like Pablo Picasso.”

Ai-Da was launched in 2019 after Meller worked with a robotics company based in Cornwall, England, to build it.

“It questions what it means to be human, it’s about more than just the question of art,” said Meller. “I think Ai-Da is a foretaste of where a human could go… so she's very disturbing just by her existence, but she's just a symptom of what's happening, she doesn't, she's just a Symbol of that.”

Before Ai-Da begins his artwork, he discusses with his creators what things he would like to paint. “In this case, we had a discussion with her about 'AI Forever,' which led to Ai-Da mentioning Alan Turing as a key figure in the history of AI that she wanted to portray,” Meller said in a statement.

After answering questions about the style, content, tone and texture of the painting, Ai-Da viewed an image of Turing with cameras in front of his eyes and created preliminary sketches of him. 15 individual paintings were then created of parts of Turing's face, each different depending on how the algorithm interprets the photo.

It took everyone about six to eight hours to complete the robot and then they were asked how to put them together. In the end, they settled on three of them, as well as a painting of Turing's Bombe Machine, the name of the code-breaking device he built, which appears in the background.

Since Ai-Das Arm can only paint on a small canvas of 11.7 x 16.5 inches, the final image is printed on a larger canvas using a 3D texture printer. Sotheby's noted that “the underlying image is not altered in this process.”

The way Ai-Da paints has changed since its inception, Meller said, as the agency it has “continues to advance” and its technology is constantly updated to stay current.

“The key value of my work is its ability to serve as a catalyst for dialogue on emerging technologies,” Ai-Da said in a statement.

“'AI God,' a portrait of pioneer Alan Turing, invites viewers to reflect on the God-like nature of AI and computing while considering the ethical and societal implications of these advances. “Alan Turing has seen this potential and is staring at us as we race toward that future,” the robot added.