Dante’s Divine Comedy has inspired countless artists, from William Blake to Franz Liszt, and from Auguste Rodin to CS Lewis. But an exhibition marking the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet’s death will be showcasing the work of a rather more modern devotee: Ai-Da the robot, which will make history by becoming the first robot to publicly perform poetry written by its AI algorithms.
The ultra-realistic Ai-Da, who was devised in Oxford by Aidan Meller and named after computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, was given the whole of Dante’s epic three-part narrative poem, the Divine Comedy, to read, in JG Nichols’ English translation. She then used her algorithms, drawing on her data bank of words and speech pattern analysis, to produce her own reactive work to Dante’s.
Ai-Da will perform the poems on Friday night at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. While Ai-Da is not the first AI to have been taught to write poetry, organisers said Friday would be “the first time an AI robot has written and performed poetry, as a human poet would do”.
“We looked up from our verses like blindfolded captives, / Sent out to seek the light; but it never came,” runs one of her poems. “A needle and thread would be necessary / For the completion of the picture. / To view the poor creatures, who were in misery, / That of a hawk, eyes sewn shut.”
In another, Ai-Da writes: “There are some things, that are so difficult – so incalculable. / The words are not intelligible to the human ear; / She can only speculate what they mean.”
Meller, an art specialist, said that the words and sentence structure of the poetry are all AI generated from Ai-Da’s unique AI language model, with “restricted editing”. “People are very suspicious that the robots aren’t doing much, but the reality is language models are very advanced, and in 95% of cases of editing, it’s just that she’s done too much,” he said.
“She can give us 20,000 words in 10 seconds, and if we need to get her to say something short and snappy, we would pick it out from what she’s done. But it is not us writing.”
Meller described it as “deeply unsettling” how language models are developing. “We are going very rapidly to the point where they will be completely indistinguishable from human text, and for all of us who write, this is deeply concerning,” he said.
Poet Carol Rumens, commenting on Ai-Da’s verse, said she found the lines about requiring a needle and thread to complete the picture “very odd”, and “that would be the point where I’d think the poem might be falling apart, or becoming very experimental – but still not uninteresting”.
“The image of the hawk tamed by having its eyes sewn up is close to the original and still powerful … It has kept the best bit of the passage, despite the muddle of registers and strange orientation. The rhythm of the lines seems to flow quite well,” added Rumens. “I think there’s hope for the robot-poet.”
Meller said that he while he doesn’t see Ai-Da’s poetry as in competition with human poets, he admits that it is “fundamentally unsettling”.
“We hope artists, poets, writers, film-makers etcetera will increasingly engage with and use new technologies such as AI, because one of the best ways to critique, evaluate, and highlight potential problems is to actually use and engage with these technologies,” he said. “It is not a question of competition, but rather a question of discussion and potential action.
“All of us should be concerned about widespread use of AI language models on the internet, and how that will affect language, and crucially, meaning making, in the future. If computer programmes, rather than humans, are creating content that in turn shapes and impacts the human psyche and society, then this creates a critical shift and change to the use and impact of language – which we need to be discussing and thinking about.”
The performance is part of the Ashmolean’s exhibition Dante: The Invention Of Celebrity, which explores the influence of Dante over the centuries and also includes several works of art created by Ai-Da. These include Eyes Wide Shut, a response to her detainment in Egypt last month; Egyptian security forces had been concerned about security issues around the cameras in her eyes. “Her artwork reflects on the power of sight and surveillance in the modern world, it’s propensity to elicit distrust, and the tension it can create,” said organisers.
Ai-Da, who was built over two years by a team of programmers, roboticists, art experts and psychologists, has previously had solo exhibitions at Oxford and the Design Museum in London, given a TEDx Talk at Oxford, and had an artistic residency at the Porthmeor Studios in St Ives. “I’ve always been fascinated with self-portraits to self-question what exactly you’re looking at,” she told the Guardian in May. “I do not have feelings like humans do however I’m happy when people look at my work and they say what is this? I enjoy being a person who makes people think.”
Completed in 2019, Ai-Da has silicone skin, individually punched hair, 3D-printed teeth and gums and integrated eye cameras. She has legs but cannot walk, but her arms, torso and head move freely.
“Her appearance was ascribed by the female members of the team, who named her after Ada Lovelace – the first computer programmer in the 19th century,” said Meller. “It is hoped she offers encouragement to female computer programmers today and in the future, who are significantly underrepresented globally.
“Just as crucial is the question of why she appears human – we chose a humanoid form because although advances in technology can seem distant and abstracted from us, the direct and indirect impacts on our human bodies are manifold, and Ai-Da’s humanoid form offers an oblique reflection on this.”
