This Robotic Arm Is an Abstract Artist

Source: Aruna Urs for ThomasNet

Imagine you're at an art class or studio, and the person next to you is a red robot arm painting abstract portraits on canvas. As futuristic as it sounds, a Carnegie Mellon team is working on making this commonplace, courtesy of their AI-powered robot?FRIDA?— named after the famous Mexican portrait painter Frida Kahlo.

Powered by AI image-generating tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion and OpenAI's?CLIP, ChatGPT, and DALL-E 2, FRIDA creates art based on visual directions, human text, and audio prompts.

The team behind FRIDA also gave it human-like qualities. It can pull away from the canvas, take a photo of its work, compare it with images embedded in its memory, and then return to work. So far, FRIDA painted several?impressionistic portraits?of professors, historical figures, landscapes, cityscapes, and a self-portrait.

The robot does require humans to “prompt the machine, mix the paints, set up the canvas, and limit the number of total brushstrokes.” Moreover, as its creators point out, FRIDA is not out to replace artists but only assist them, helping further human-robot collaboration in the art space.