I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately--as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor. I sometimes look up words after I write them: does "illegible" still mean too messy to read? The day after Donald Trump's second Inauguration, my verbal cognition kept glitching: I got an e-mail from the children's-clothing company Hanna Andersson and read the name as "Hamas"; on the street, I thought "hot yoga" was "hot dogs"; on the subway, a theatre poster advertising "Jan. Ticketing" said "Jia Tolentino" to me. Even the words that I might use to more precisely describe the sensation of "losing it" elude me.

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.

Ai-Da, the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid AI robot artist, has made history once again due to her appearance in the House of Lords, the second chamber of the UK Parliament, where she addressed the question of whether creativity is under attack in today's ever-changing, technology-driven world. Ai-Da's address to members of the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee was part of the House of Lords' inquiry into the future of the creative industries. During her speech, she explored the topic of AI and how this new technology is pushing the boundaries of how we think about creativity. We are entering a new era of machine creativity that presents new possibilities of creativity and technology beyond what humans can do. Ai-Da's creativity, which is driven by AI, sparks an in-depth conversation on what it means to be human in a post-human society, at a time when technology is fostering creativity like never before.

Originally published on Towards AI the World's Leading AI and Technology News and Media Company. If you are building an AI-related product or service, we invite you to consider becoming an AI sponsor. At Towards AI, we help scale AI and technology startups. Let us help you unleash your technology to the masses. Some time ago, a scientific paper with the title A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style by Gatys et al. [1] caught my attention.

Prompts attempting to get DALL-E Mini to draw itself. Top (L-R): "a portrait of DALL-E," "Photo of DALL-E Looking at the camera," "DALL-E reveals itself."

The world's first robotic self-portraits, painted by an android called Ai-Da, have been unveiled at a new art exhibit in London, despite the "artist" not having a "self" to portray. The surprisingly accurate images question the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in human society and challenge the idea that art is exclusively a human trait, according to her creators. Ai-Da is a life-size android artist powered by AI -- computer algorithms that mimic the intelligence of humans -- that can paint, sculpt, gesture, blink and talk. Ai-Da is designed to look and act like a human woman with a female voice. Her head and torso looks like a mannequin's and she wears a variety of different dresses and wigs, although a pair of exposed mechanical arms do give her away as robotic.

She, if it can be called a she, began her career with abstract art but has now moved to self, if they can be called self, portraits and they are alarmingly good. "She is getting better all of the time," said Aidan Meller, the force behind Ai-Da, the world's first ultra-realistic robot artist, who is the subject of a display at the Design Museum in London. Ai-Da's move into self-portraiture will be seen for the first time at the museum, with three large-scale works going on display. They raise interesting questions about identity and creativity. "It is literally the world's first self-portrait with no self," said Meller.

A Dutch artist is using modern technology to create realistic photo-style portraits of famous figures only depicted in paint and sculpture. Bas Uterwijk, from Amsterdam, explained that he wanted to see if he could create realistic digital renderings of key faces in history, including Vincent Van Gogh and Napoleon. He also turned his talents to statues like Michelangelo's David and the Statue of Liberty. Bas uses Artbreeder, a'deep-learning' software which can create life-like images from scratch or based on a composite of different portraits. Bas Uterwijk, from Amsterdam, can create likenesses of famous historical figures using'deep-learning' technology.

San Francisco: Google has unveiled an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based web app that will create a poem portrait for you. Called "POEMPORTRAITS," the online collective artwork is a combination of poetry, design and Machine Learning (ML). "A'POEMPORTRAIT' is your self-portrait overlaid with a unique poem, created by AI. You can create your own and contribute to the evolving, collective poem," Google said in a blog post on Thursday. To create your poem portrait, donate a word of your choice and take a self-portrait.

Next time you can't find the perfect angle for your selfie, just thank the universe you're not NASA's InSight lander. The spacecraft had to take 11 images with a camera attached to its robotic arm and then stitch them together to create its first self-portrait. InSight clearly took a cue from the Curiosity rover, which has years of experience taking composite selfies with the Martian landscape as its background. You can clearly see InSight's solar panels on full display in the photo, which was captured on December 6th, along with some of its science instruments. InSight touched down on Mars on November 26th after traveling through space for six months. It was NASA's first Martian landing since 2012.