AARON, Dr. Harold Cohen's LISP programmed AI Artist - Why Painters, Illustrators and Graphic Artiste will be replaced by AI

“The machine had become a world-class colourist - it was much more adventurous in terms of colour than I was”

Programmer and artiste Harold Cohen commenting on the work of AARON, an artificially Intelligent Painter and drawing algorithm

AI (Artificial Intelligence) has certainly come a long way. But they’re not still self-aware just very clever at passing Turing-Test like situations by mimicking human behavior so well, you’d be easily convince it was done by a human.

Take for instance the LISP-based computer program AARON, which paint beautiful paintings with little or no input and basic instructions as reported in the article “Intelligent Machines: AI art is taking on the experts”, published 18 September 2015 By Jane Wakefield, BBC News.

AARON is a relic from the 70's that was created and improved upon over the years by Dr. Harold Cohen. A pioneer in the AI field, Dr. Harold Cohen, a former artist and University of California San Diego professor created AARON in 1973, while a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab as explained in the article “Creative AI: The robots that would be painters”, published Richard Moss, Gizmag.

The program is written in LISP, a visual and graphics input and output based program developed by John McCarthy, one of the founding father in the early research into Artificial Intelligence back in the 1960.

Just take a look at some of the artwork that AARON has “painted” over the years.

Dr. Harold Cohen spent the majority of his life getting AARON to be a painter and as good as any human being. Most of AARON’s ability to paint was derived from Dr. Harold Cohen teaching it the basic rules of form and shape i.e. body part of humans and how they fit together, as it has never seen a human being. 

Its algorithm then combines them in more interesting ways in a process mimicking human thinking. Using an attached paintbrush, AARON paints what forms it “thinks” up.

But all is not well in this odd couple relationship. It's a harbinger for the future relationship between man, Machine and Art, the thing we hold sacred as indication of our place in humanity.

AARON the LISP programmed AI Artist - Why Painters, Illustrators and Graphic Artiste will soon be replaced by AI

Interestingly the relationship between Dr. Cohen and AARON has changed. In the early days, the computer algorithm was connected to a robotic arm that painted, leading many to say it was a robot running a pre-set program. Albeit technically an AI is really a software bot with the ability to learn on its own, Dr. Cohen was a tad upset.

Until it began “thinking” for itself, or at least painting more like a real person, with an abstract flair. More and more, as AARON draws, paints and remembers, it needs less and less input from Dr. Cohen. Again, here’s evidence of his progress, as he can now do form and shapes of humans.

This made him wonder if this pupil would one day replace him in much the same way Georgia Institute of Technology's Scheherazade AI would replace writers as predicted in my blog article entitled “Scheherazade AI from Georgia Institute of Technology - Why Writers and Journalists will be replaced by Artificial Intelligence and Robots”.

To quote Dr. Harold Cohen, he became afraid of AARON one day taking away his painting gig, quote: “I dreamed up a very simple algorithm and it obviously embodied a great deal of knowledge, but when I looked at the output I didn't remember doing it because I hadn't done it. It no longer needed me. I never intended to leave everything to the program, but it gradually came to me that it could do without me. It had become autonomous enough to disturb the guy who wrote the program”.

Since these doubts have begun to creep into his mind, he's relegated AARON to drawing while he practices painting using a giant Touchscreen. Aside from making him a potential customer for the Apple iPad Pro with its large 12" screen and Apple Pencil (not a stylus) as described in my Geezam blog article entitled “Why Apple iPhone 6S, Apple TV, Apple iPad Pro with Pencil spells Success”, the truth us undeniable.

At some point in the future, Painter and paintings will be done by machine. It may already possible to describe a scene to a computer program similar to AARON and it can do a cartoon caricature for a news paper or even a book cover, potentially putting a lot of Graphic artist out of work.

Dr. Harold Cohen enunciates these fears during his BBC Interview, quote: “I don't deny the possibility that, at some point in the future, a machine can make something approaching art - but it is going to be a lot more complex than teaching a car to drive around a city without a driver, and it isn't going to happen next Wednesday or even in what is left of this century”

So Writers aren't the only one that must be fearful Painters, Illustrators and Graphic Artiste too, have the jobs on the line once full-blow AI becomes a reality! And based on these paintings, he's very nearly got the hang of painting from his soul.