To dismiss the role of the artist in the increasingly frenzied conversations around artificial intelligence (AI) is to bypass swathes of art history which put man on equal footing with machine.
For artist Harold Cohen, who developed the first AI artmaking programme in the late 1960s, AARON, the resulting creativity stemmed from an equal collaboration between the programme and the programmer. Drawing directly from rules coded personally by the artist – unlike today’s software, which gathers information from existing imagery, guided by prompts from the user – Cohen’s AARON machine software is an artwork in its own right.
