by Disha Sinha
December 15, 2021
Ai-Da is gaining popularity for being the first robotic poet as well as a robotic artist
Artificial intelligence religiously creates robots with newer capabilities. But very few would have thought that it now also enables robots to write poetry and even indulge in artworks. There is a dominant perception that robots are made of metal and ceramic and that they do more harm than good to people. Mainstream Hollywood fiction movies have reinforced such perceptions. But the wonder that AI is, now the softer functions of robots have emerged to challenge such an idea. The world can now meet Ai-Da, a robotic poet as well as a robotic artist with the integration of robotics and artificial intelligence.
Aidan Meller from Oxford has made it possible by being the creator of Ai-Da, a robot with a difference. The world’s very first ultra-realistic humanoid robot is both a poet and an artist of high caliber. Recently she went as far as to present a public performance of her poems in the memory of Dante, the Italian poet and the creator of the epic, Divine Comedy. The performance was a part of the great poet’s 700th death anniversary. Ai-Da enthralled the audience in Oxford’s Ashmoleon Museum with her poetry which had a special attribute. Her own poetry was responsive in character, in the sense that being intellectually impacted by Dante’s speech patterns she used her own algorithms and database to generate her own creative output with the integration of robotics.
As any creator would be, Aidan Meller himself was eager to point out that the emotion that came out of such lines pronounced by Ai-Da makes her no different from the poems created by human beings. Here is a specimen of the robotic poet as well as a robotic artist:
“We looked up from our verses like blindfolded captives,
Sent out to seek the light, but it never came
A needle and thread would be necessary
For the completion of the picture.
To view the poor creatures, who were in misery,
That of a hawk, eyes are sewn shut.”
The lines go quite well with the goal of Ai-Da’s creation: utilization of AI for making robots to emulate human beings by conforming to human behavior with robotics. It also focuses on the habitual patterns of human beings to reveal the possible close connection between human beings and robots. Not the least, such instances produce a humane and liberating image of cutting-edge …….