The iconic auction house Sotheby’s is no stranger to weird and wonderful works of art fetching eye-watering prices. But last year, Sotheby’s sold a piece made by an entirely new kind of artist: an ‘ultra-realistic” humanoid robot known as Ai-Da.
The piece, titled A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing, was auctioned online by Sotheby’s on November 7, 2024, and ultimately sold for $1.08 million to an anonymous buyer, making it, by far, the most expensive artwork created by a humanoid robot. The online auction attracted 27 competing bids and greatly exceeded the expected sale price of $120,00 to $180,000, with the proceeds going towards future upgrades and development for the robot.
The English gallerist Aidan Meller created Ai-Da in 2019 in collaboration with researchers and engineers at the University of Oxford, the University of Leeds, and the Cornish robotics company Engineered Arts. Ai-Da uses her bionic hands to draw and paint with the help of artificial intelligence algorithms and cameras located in her eyes. Named after the 19th-century mathematician and early computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, Ai-Da even looks like an artist, with a fashionable bob hairstyle and dark overalls that leave her robotic arms on display. Ai-Da is also able to generate speech and even poetry using large language models, mainly on topics relating to art and technology. She even gave evidence at the British Parliament in 2022, answering questions at a House of Lords committee.
Though only several years into her fledgling art career, Ai-Da’s work has been displayed around the world, including self-portraits at the Design Museum in London. The Turing portrait was part of a set of five panels originally exhibited at the United Nations “AI for Good” Global Summit in Geneva, Switzerland.
Ai-Da’s subject matter was fitting: a portrait of the pioneering British mathematician Alan Turing, widely considered the father of modern computer science. Most famous as a Bletchley Park codebreaker during World War II, Turing was a prominent early contributor to the field of artificial intelligence, then in its infancy.
Ai-Da assembled the piece by combining multiple paintings that she had made of Turing’s face. The background of the painting also references Turing’s codebreaking Bombe machine. The original artwork was small, due to the limitations of Ai-Da’s robotic arms, and was enlarged by a 3D textured printer onto a much bigger canvas.
A robot’s homage to the father of computer science:
- Ai-Da’s fractured and unsettling portrait of Turing evokes the tragic conclusion of Turing’s life. According to Ai-Da, the abstract painting’s “fractured and multilayered approach” shows Turing’s “deeper emotional and intellectual layers.”
- Though now celebrated for his role in decrypting Nazi communications and the development of early computers, Turing’s final years were a tragedy.
- Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” in 1952 when it was discovered that he was in a relationship with another man. He chose to accept “chemical castration” as an alternative to prison. Though the circumstances of his death remain unclear, it seems likely that he took his own life via cyanide poisoning in June 1954.
