When AI tools like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion turned your short text prompts into digital art? Meet Frida, an AI-driven robot out of Carnegie Mellon University that transforms your prompts into physical paintings, complete with bold brushstrokes in a variety of techniques. Perhaps most strikingly, the bot can change course as it paints to mimic the iterative nature of making art. "It will work with its failures and it will alter its goals," Peter Schaldenbrand, a Ph.D. student at CMU's School of Computer Science and one of the robot's creators, said in a video describing the project. Frida aims to explore the intersection of robots and creativity, says the team, which presents its research paper this May at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in London.

The age-old question in my industry is, "Where are we in a given hype cycle?" For now, crypto news cycle dominance has, thankfully, died now, largely through its own self-destructive tendencies. FTX obviously served as the most prominent recent example of what happens when the tech community believes its own hype. You so badly wish for the success of a concept that you lose the thread. Sprinkle in legitimately bad actors and platforms that allow such actions to thrive, and you've got a recipe for catastrophic implosion.

One could make a very reasonable argument that FRIDA (Framework and Robotics Initiative for Developing Arts) is as much a thought experiment as it is a research project. Certainly it butts up against similar questions around art and creativity as AI projects like DALL-E and ChatGPT -- though the question is arguably even more in your face when it's a robot arm doing the painting on a real-world canvas. I recognize this is all extremely subjective, but at this point in the process, I'd go out on a limb and say the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute's project has some catching up to do with software-based AI systems. Even so, it's fascinating to watch the project, which (obviously) gets its name from renowned Mexican portrait painter Frida Kahlo. "FRIDA is a project exploring the intersection of human and robotic creativity," says CMU professor Jim McCann.

Painting is an artistic process of rendering visual content that achieves the high-level communication goals of an artist that may change dynamically throughout the creative process. In this paper, we present a Framework and Robotics Initiative for Developing Arts (FRIDA) that enables humans to produce paintings on canvases by collaborating with a painter robot using simple inputs such as language descriptions or images. FRIDA introduces several technical innovations for computationally modeling a creative painting process. First, we develop a fully differentiable simulation environment for painting, adopting the idea of real to simulation to real (real2sim2real). We show that our proposed simulated painting environment is higher fidelity to reality than existing simulation environments used for robot painting. Second, to model the evolving dynamics of a creative process, we develop a planning approach that can continuously optimize the painting plan based on the evolving canvas with respect to the high-level goals. In contrast to existing approaches where the content generation process and action planning are performed independently and sequentially, FRIDA adapts to the stochastic nature of using paint and a brush by continually re-planning and re-assessing its semantic goals based on its visual perception of the painting progress. We describe the details on the technical approach as well as the system integration.

Jessamine Chan's debut novel, The School for Good Mothers, is not a domestic manual on keeping house. Nor is it the sort of slog that might make tidying look like an appealing alternative. Yet as I read it over the course of one snowy evening, I repeatedly put it down to complete household tasks normally ignored until morning. Every last sock met its match. This book is a horror story so potent it will fill even the most diligent parent with an itchy impulse to panic-clean, to straighten up, to act like someone's watching.

Swiss automation firm ABB is showing off a concept factory robot called Frida that's more humanoid than the typical one-armed drones on the assembly line. The two-armed Frida is being billed as a "harmless robotic co-worker for industrial assembly." Of course, any robot described as being "harmless" should be treated with extreme caution. It has seven-axis arms, flexible grippers, and camera-based parts location and runs via ABB's IRC5 controller. It's designed as a lightweight, portable complement to human parts assembly.