“We decided we wanted to do something that was completely historically unprecedented. But she realized a limitation to this approach-the best algorithm wouldn’t work well if the data it learned from didn’t reflect the real world. Stanford researcher Fei-Fei Li saw her colleagues across academia and the AI industry hammering away at the same concept: a better algorithm would make better decisions, regardless of the data. The unresolved questions about machine art are, first, what its potential is and, second, whether-irrespective of the quality of the work produced-it can truly be described as “creative” or “imaginative.” These are problems, profound and fascinating, that take us deep into the mysteries of human art-making. Clearly, AARON is his pupil in that respect. AARON has never moved far out of the general stylistic idiom in which Cohen himself worked in the 1960s, when he was a successful exponent of color field abstraction.

AARON has been able to make pictures autonomously for decades even in the late 1980s Cohen was able to joke that he was the only artist who would ever be able to have a posthumous exhibition of new works created entirely after his own death.Īre the pictures the evolving program has made over the last four decades really works by Harold Cohen, or independent creations by AARON itself, or perhaps collaborations between the two? It is a delicate problem. Since 1973, Harold Cohen-a painter, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a onetime representative of Britain at the Venice Biennale-has been collaborating with a program called AARON.

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