Meet Ai-Da: the robot artist giving real painters a run for their money

"We just can't predict what she will do, what she's going to produce, what the limit of her output is," said Aidan Meller, curator of the Unsecured Futures exhibition which opens at St John's College, Oxford on June 12. "We're at the beginning of a new era of humanoid robots and it will be fascinating to see the effect on art." Mr Meller is clear that his goal is not to replace human artists. "In the 1850s everyone thought photography would replace art and artists, but actually it complemented art - it became a new genre bringing many new jobs," he said. He added, however, that within the narrow genre of shattered light abstraction, Ai-Da is producing images "as good as anything else we've seen".