The Robot That Can Make Art and Write Poetry
If you thought robots were emotionless machines, think again — because a man in England has invented a robot that can create art and write poems.
Aidan Meller created Ai-Da with the help of UK robotics company Engineered Arts and scientists from the universities of Oxford and Leeds. Ai-Da is able to look at work from human artists and learn from it to create her own work.
In an interview with CNN, Meller said that Ai-Da's poetry is "so great, if you read it you wouldn't know that it wasn't written by a human."
For example, Ai-Da wrote poems based on the work of Italian poet Dante Alighieri.
Ai-Da read Dante's The Divine Comedy, an over 14,000-line poem written in the early 14th century. She then used computer learning technology to copy Alighieri's style.
In November, Ai-Da read one of her poems in Oxford, at an exhibition to celebrate the 700th anniversary of Alighieri's death. While this wasn't the first time a computer had written poetry, organizers said it was the first time a robot had both written and read its own poem, just like a human.
According to Meller, Ai-Da can write up to 20,000 words in just 10 seconds. The words she produces need only a small amount of editing, he says.
Ai-Da can also draw pictures and make other types of art using a simple robot arm.
Ai-Da is named after Ada Lovelace, a 19th century English woman who has been called the world's first computer programmer.
