Ai-Da

Ai-Da — named for Ada Lovelace — is billed as the world’s first ultra-realistic humanoid robot artist. Devised in 2019 by Oxford gallerist Aidan Meller and built with Cornwall robotics firm Engineered Arts and researchers at Oxford and Leeds, it draws and paints using cameras in its eyes, AI algorithms, and a robotic arm, and answers questions through a language model.

From Parliament to the auction block

In October 2022 Ai-Da became the first robot to give evidence to the UK Parliament, telling a visibly startled House of Lords communications committee how it makes art while disclaiming any inner life. Exhibitions followed at the Venice Biennale, the Design Museum, and the United Nations’ AI for Good summit, where it painted a portrait of King Charles.

In November 2024, A.I. God: Portrait of Alan Turing — a fractured, sombre likeness of the computing pioneer — sold at Sotheby’s New York for roughly $1.08 million against a $120,000–$180,000 estimate, the first artwork by a humanoid robot sold at a major auction house. Meller said proceeds would be reinvested in the project.

The nuance is unavoidable: Ai-Da is a made object whose “statements” are generated language models curated by a human team, and critics dismiss the project as a gallerist’s marketing spectacle that anthropomorphizes a machine to inflate prices. Meller counters that this discomfort is the artwork — Ai-Da exists, he says, to force exactly these questions about creativity, agency, and value in the age of AI.