AI art and public literacy: the miseducation of Ai-Da the robot

Abstract

This article examines the implications of the artworks and public performances of the robot artist Ai-Da. While the project claims to advance AI public literacy and foster critical debate around intelligent systems, it instead ends up perpetuating popular misunderstandings about AI creativity, agency, and consciousness. Built in 2019, Ai-Da is a humanoid robot capable of creating drawings, paintings, and composing poetry. However, the project often conceals or miscommunicates the technical aspects of Ai-Da’s capabilities in a manner that encourages the public to misattribute human-like traits to the robot. This lack of transparency in the presentation of Ai-Da’s abilities and the creative processes involved risks reinforcing existing misconceptions about AI, rather than promoting a more nuanced understanding. By employing discourse analysis and drawing on scholarship on machine and computational creativity, anthropomorphism in social robots, and posthuman embodiment, this article uses the Ai-Da project as a case study to illustrate how the dangers of AI hype can be obscured when presented through the lens of public art. The analysis examines how the Ai-Da project, despite its stated goals of advancing AI literacy, fails to effectively challenge and may even exacerbate public misperceptions about the nature of AI-generated art and creativity.