A portrait of Turing, created by the robot Ai-Da, was auctioned at Sotheby’s for $1 million

Ai-Da’s creator, gallerist Aidan Meller, developed the robot in collaboration with Engineered Arts and a team from the University of Leeds in the UK. Moeller told PCMag that the proceeds from the sale will be reinvested into the project: “We have some innovative ideas for Ai-Da that will come out next year, and all the money we make now will be put back into the project.”

Ai-Da has been attracting the attention of the global art community for several years now. Her work, featured in international exhibitions including the UN Summit in Geneva, is sparking lively discussions about what it means to be an artist in the age of technology. “My art encourages reflection on the relationship between man and machine,” the robot says in one of his video messages.

The robot’s developers claim that each of its jobs is unique and unpredictable. Unlike algorithms that simply compile content based on pre-existing images, Ai-Da creates images using autonomous built-in tools, thus different from systems like DALL-E or Midjourney.