The world's first ultra-realistic robot artist Ai-Da Robot can create architectural designs using camera eyes and AI algorithms. Her Space Pod concept envisions modular housing.

In early 2025, Augmented Intelligence - Christie's first AI art auction - drew criticism for showcasing a controversial genre. Amid wider legal uncertainty, artists voiced concerns over data mining practices, notably with respect to copyright. The backlash could be viewed as a microcosm of AI's contested position in the creative economy. Touching on the auction's presentation, reception, and results, this paper explores how, among social dissonance, machine learning finds its place in the artworld. Foregrounding responsible innovation, the paper provides a balanced perspective that champions creators' rights and brings nuance to this polarised debate. With a focus on exhibition design, it centres framing, which refers to the way a piece is presented to influence consumer perception. Context plays a central role in shaping our understanding of how good, valuable, and even ethical an artwork is. In this regard, Augmented Intelligence situates AI art within a surprisingly traditional framework, leveraging hallmarks of "high art" to establish the genre's cultural credibility. Generative AI has a clear economic dimension, converging questions of artistic merit with those of monetary worth. Scholarship on ways of seeing, or framing, could substantively inform the interpretation and evaluation of creative outputs, including assessments of their aesthetic and commercial value.

Some of 2024's most interesting science, technology, and history stories could be found in international auctions. Regardless of their final winning bids, each of the following items and artifacts are impressive in their own right. From AI-painted artwork to hunks of coal, these auction items highlight the wide range of not just artifacts from the past, but future-forward items, as well. If nearly 45 million sounds like a lot for a dinosaur skeleton to you, you aren't alone. Although billed as one of the "finest" known examples, a stegosaurus named "Apex" almost immediately drew controversy over the summer for a final bid that came in at over 10 times Sotheby's initial estimation.

A humanoid robot is slated to become first of its kind to have its artwork sold by a major auction house. On October 16, Sotheby's announced it will soon begin accepting bids starting at 120,000 for "AI God." The abstract portrait of Alan Turing was painted by Ai-Da, an ongoing, experimental AI-powered robotics project that cites a pivotal 1980's transhumanist feminist manifesto as its inspiration. The auction is scheduled to run from October 31st through November 7th. Completed in 2019 by gallerist Aidan Meller in collaboration with Oxford University researchers and the robotics company, Engineered Arts, Ai-Da uses cameras to capture visual inputs that onboard graphics algorithms then use to formulate generative images with some human guidance and adjustments.

Making dinner reservations can be stressful and time-consuming, but thankfully help may soon be on the way. From as early as next year ChatGPT will be able to call restaurants and make bookings, according to an AI expert. Aidan Meller, director of the Ai-Da robot project, thinks a big update to the popular AI is due in 2024. Mr Meller says that the chatbot will soon be able to take actions in the world, rather than just act as a text editor. The last update to ChatGPT, version 4, came in the Spring of this year and has raised hopes for big improvements in version 5. ChatGPT's next update could give it the ability to call up restaurants and make reservations on your behalf without any need for you to intervene While non-paying users still make do with version ChatGPT 3.5, version 4 brought improved memory and also enabled data-to-text functions.

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. The Australian writer, director, and producer is known for his flashy, hyper-realistic style, and on this particular New York night he's in a sparse, brightly lit former taxi warehouse in Chelsea, talking to a robot. The bot's name is Ai-Da; she's a painter powered by artificial intelligence. Before Luhrmann took the stage next to her, she was doing a watercolor while people gawked and took photos. "Did you see Elvis, Ai-Da?" he asked.

Australian singer Nick Cave came out strongly against an AI-generated track "in the style of Nick Cave" sent to him in January by a fan. It is "bullshit," said Cave. Meanwhile, three female fine artists recently filed a class action lawsuit in the US against several AI companies, charging them with theft of creative ideas. There's no doubt that artificial intelligence is making its way into the art world. While the consequences remain uncertain at this early stage, artists are already concerned about the appropriation of their intellectual property.

The robustness of the methodology of this particular study is of less interest than the phenomenon in general, only because of the recent ubiquity of the debate. That is, if people see AI-generated images as art, and are moved by them, then what? What do we need human artists for? For Swedish artist Jonas Lund, DALL·E, Midjourney and other existing forms of AI "cannot be art without an artist … Without an artist, it's not art, it's something else." In other words, just because the outputs of these sophisticated AI systems are images, doesn't mean they're art.

After turning heads with her paintings of icons like Queen Elizabeth II and Sir Paul McCartney, artificial intelligence robot Ai-Da made a historic appearance in the UK's House of Lords on October 11, where the sophisticated automaton answered questions as part of a wider inquiry into the relationship between technology and creativity in the modern world. Ai-Da's parliamentary cameo is a reminder that emerging AI technologies have a more diverse range of positive applications than many people might think. As well as its extensive use in the creative sector (which is often heralded as the defining distinction between human and robot), AI also has much to offer in terms of improving safety, efficiency, and the overall user experience in a variety of different industries and areas. Ai-Da might be commanding much of the headlines surrounding AI art at the moment, but she represents the merest tip of the iceberg when it comes to AI's contribution to the creative sector. Indeed, the gaming industry has been one of the driving forces and guinea pigs behind the development of the technology, with the first chess algorithms coming out in the 1950s and IBM's Deep Blue creating quite the storm in 1997 when it beat then-Grandmaster Garry Kasparov.

With the new surge in artificial intelligence's abilities, more people are asking what constitutes art. AI images from text prompts in programs like DALL-E and Midjourney are everywhere these days and are constantly improving. The existence of an artificially intelligent robot named Ai-da also means we have to ask what constitutes an artist. Ai-da exhibited a series of self-portraits at London's Design Museum last year, which you can see in the video below. She continues to create art so us mere mortals must confront how technology and creativity intersect.