'Mind-blowing': Ai-Da becomes first robot to paint like an artist

Brush clamped firmly in bionic hand, Ai-Da's robotic arm moves slowly, dipping in to a paint palette then making slow, deliberate strokes across the paper in front of her. This, according to Aidan Meller, the creator of the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid robot, Ai-Da, is "mind-blowing" and "groundbreaking" stuff. In a small room at London's British Library, Ai-Da – assigned the she/her pronoun – has become the first robot to paint as artists have painted for centuries. Camera eyes fixed on her subject, AI algorithms prompt Ai-Da to interrogate, select, decision-make and, ultimately, create a painting. It's painstaking work, taking more than five hours a painting, but with no two works exactly the same.