‘Midway through the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood / for I had strayed from the straight pathway to this tangled ground.’
‘We looked up from our verses like blindfolded captives / Sent out to seek the light; but it never came’.
One of these poems was written by a robot, and one is by a human. Which one do you think is which?
The first is an extract from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated from Italian to English. The second was written by the artificial intelligence robot ‘Ai-Da’. Ai-Da was created by the University of Oxford, to test whether AI could create art in the same way a human could. Ai-Da ‘read’ all 14,233 lines of The Divine Comedy, and used algorithms to generate this poem, based on what it had learned.
The technology behind Ai-Da is a modern invention, but robotics has been used in the arts for over a century. Before the 19th century, art was purely physical – you had to be in the room to see, hear, or make it. Think of theatres packed with audience members watching actors on stage, an orchestra playing a concert, or a gallery of hand painted artworks. But the tide began to turn in 1895, when the French brothers Auguste and Louise Lumiere showcased a series of artistic films with sound. By 1916, twenty-five million Americans attended a movie every single day – far outnumbering those who were going to the theatre to watch live actors in a play. By the 1960s, watching dramas on TV was widespread in homes around the world and computer generated imaged (CGI) was first developed by the American company Motion Graphics Incorporated.
Whilst these moments in history were ground-breaking, the use of robotics in art nowadays is commonplace. It is rare for a film to be released in 2022 that has no element of CGI, and some films are more CGI than live-action, with Marvel Studios in particular being notorious for its use of greenscreen. In the art world, the development of NFTs has likewise changed how artwork is viewed and bought, with physical ownership no longer being a necessity. Even celebrity artists are not immune from the digital take-over. Hatsune Miku, first developed in 2007, is a ‘vocaloid’, a virtual avatar with computer generated voice, who performs live at concerts. She has since inspired a wave of virtual celebrities,