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Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming art, and robots are not exempt from this trend. Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) robotic arm, called Frida, is an AI-driven robot that can turn text prompts into physical paintings.
Unlike earlier AI tools like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion, or even Midjourney, which produced digital art, Frida creates physical paintings with bold brushstrokes in various techniques. Moreover, Frida mimics the iterative nature of art-making by altering its goals and working with its failures.
Frida is designed to explore the intersection of robots and creativity. The team behind it presents its research paper at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in London.
Frida stands for Framework and Robotics Initiative for Developing Arts, named after the renowned Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.
However, the robot itself is just a robotic arm with a paintbrush attached, a configuration that the Robotics team insists "Frida is a robotic painting system, not an artist."
Humans are responsible for communicating their goals for Frida with text inputs and selecting the colours to be used. They can even show the robot images in a style or flash photographs they want to see represented as a painting.
Frida proposes suitable colours for painting on a screen, which humans then mix in the robot's palette.
Frida is different from other robots because it doesn't care about perfection. It may include mistakes like a wrong spot of paint in its final artwork. Making art is always changing, and Frida plans and learns in real-time using machine learning after simulating its process. It doesn't just focus on the outcome but also on the meaning behind it. Painting with Frida takes hours, but the results are often playful and full of bright colours.
According to Peter Schaldenbrand, a PhD student at CMU's School of Computer Science and one of the robot's creators, Frida has many uses beyond being a creative tool.
He notes that it can help people experiencing physical barriers to creating visual art and those who do not have the time to engage in the art, as it can automate some of the tedious elements. He adds that the team is working with people to discover the range of Frida's capabilities.
The CMU Robotics team made the robot easy to use by letting people talk to it normally or show it pictures. The team taught Frida by giving it images from different cultures so that it would not favour only one type of culture.
The rise of AI in art has generated excitement and raised ethical and copyright concerns among artists and lawyers. AI art is not created independently, relying on absorbing and reassembling human-made art.
If the quality of machine-generated art enhances, will this cause graphic designers, illustrators, composers, and photographers to lose their jobs? Frida's creators assure that the robot will help humans be more creative, not take over their jobs.
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