It’s about more than the motions of putting a brush to canvas

There is this story, which I know at any rate from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), about how in around the Napoleonic era, there was a chess-playing robot that was done up in ‘Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth, sat before a chessboard placed on a large table.’ Ostensibly, the ‘Mechanical Turk’, as it was called, was able to ‘respond to every move by a chess player with a countermove that would ensure the winning of the game.’ The robot would tour courts and salons, wowing onlookers with its marvellous mechanics. But it was all just an illusion. Inside the table – made to look transparent, with a system of mirrors, sat ‘a hunchback dwarf – a master at chess,’ who could see the game, and would operate the puppet in response to his opponents. The Mechanical Turk wasn’t ‘really’ doing anything. It was useless – until animated by specifically human skill.

Anyway. The other week, I came across a news story in which a robot, powered by AI, was described as ‘the first robot to paint like an artist.’ The robot in question, it turns out, is nothing new – Ai-Da, ‘named after computer science pioneer Ada Lovelace’ – has been trotted out by creator Aidan ‘no honestly, she’s named after Ada Lovelace’ Meller for years now (ArtReview covered her 2021 appearance at London’s Design Museum, with Imogen West-Knights wondering why the robot had been made to look like ‘a kind of hot woman’ – a vital question IMO).

Η συνέχεια εδώ.