At an auction on Thursday, a portrait of British mathematician Alan Turing was sold for nearly $1.1 million. This is a significant amount for a painting created not by a traditional artist, but by a robot powered by AI. The author of this experiment is Aidan Meller, a former gallerist from Oxford, UK, who, together with a team of nearly thirty people, created a robot named Ai-Da.
Ai-Da was named after Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century mathematician considered the world’s first programmer. The robot, which resembles a woman with short hair, created a semi-abstract portrait of Turing, with half of his face depicted against a dark background. “I’m trying to adapt to this somewhat surreal moment,” Meller said in an interview, recalling the final moments of the sale.
The portrait, titled “A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing,” was part of a digital Sotheby’s auction. The initial estimate ranged from $120,000 to $180,000, but the painting received over twenty-seven bids and was sold to an anonymous buyer from the US. Meller noted that the proceeds from the sale will go toward improving Ai-Da’s design. “We’re putting everything back into the project,” he said. “She’s constantly being updated. This is already her third drawing hand.”
