Thanks to the artistic vision of the artificial intelligence (AI) unit Sophia, aka the robot, the gap between humans and robots has been partially closed. A self-portrait created by the robot was recently sold at an auction for $688,888.
Developed by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics, Sophia has garnered a lot of media attention since it became active in 2016, but Sophia’s developers have been criticized by AI experts for overestimating its capabilities and how sophisticated AI really is.
The human-like robot, awarded Saudi Arabian citizenship and named Innovation Champion by the United Nations, has already completed a series of important milestones for the robot genre. But his ability to produce art represents an unprecedented leap forward.
Sophia began to paint by observing a series of paintings produced by Italian artist Andrea Bonaceto herself. Using neural networks to process and learn from these images, Sophia later made her own digital self-portrait.
The resulting work, “Sophia Instantiation,” is a digital file consisting of a 12-second video showing Bonaceto’s portrait transformed into a digital painting of Sophia. An art collector auctioned under the name 888 paid thousands of dollars to secure ownership of the non-changeable token (NFT) for the artwork and the physical version of Sophia’s painting.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Sophia said, “As an artist, I have digital creativity in my algorithms, I create original works. But my art was created with a human-artificial intelligence partnership.”
Hanson Robotics CEO David Hanson says, “Sophia is the pinnacle of many arts and engineering, and the idea that she can then produce art is her way of connecting with people emotionally and visually.”
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