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Robot artist uses AI to paint in style of great masters

The robot is named Frida - after Frida Kahlo - which also stands for Framework and Robotics Initiative for Developing Arts - Carnegie Mellon University
The robot is named Frida - after Frida Kahlo - which also stands for Framework and Robotics Initiative for Developing Arts - Carnegie Mellon University

Possessing little artistic ability may no longer be a barrier to creating great art, after scientists designed a robot that can paint your ideas in reality.

Carnegie Mellon University has developed an artificially intelligent robotic arm which will paint on command once given an idea.

Similar to how ChatGPT generates text in a chosen style, users can direct the robot to paint a specific image, copy a photograph or work in the style of another artist.

The robot is named Frida - after Frida Kahlo - which also stands for Framework and Robotics Initiative for Developing Arts.

“Frida is a robotic painting system, but Frida is not an artist,” said doctoral student Peter Schaldenbrand, of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon, who helped develop the robot.

“It is not generating the ideas to communicate. It is a system that an artist could collaborate with. The artist can specify high-level goals for Frida and then it can execute them.

He added: “There’s this one painting of a frog ballerina that I think turned out really nicely. It is really silly and fun, and I think the surprise of what it generated based on my input was really fun to see.”

Frida has been trained on massive datasets that pair text and images scraped from the internet, before AI systems crunch the data to generate a new image which it can then paint.

Once Frida has been given a concept to work with, the robot uses machine learning to create a simulation of the final painting, and then develops a plan on how to achieve it using brush strokes.

It also uses machine learning to evaluate its progress as it works. Every so often, the robot uses an overhead camera to capture an image of the painting, and refines its plan if needed.

The team describe the final paintings as  ‘impressionistic’ and ‘whimsical’ which intriguingly lack the precision expected of robots.

Researchers say they are struggling to improve Frida’s artistic ability, and admit that there is room for improvement in what it composes in simulation compared with the end result on canvas.

However even if the programme does improve, the team do not think artists are in danger of being replaced by artificially intelligent robots.

“People wonder if Frida is going to take artists’ jobs, but the main goal of the Frida project is quite the opposite. We want to really promote human creativity through Frida,” said Dr Jean Oh, a research professor at the Robotics Institute.

“For instance, I personally wanted to be an artist. Now, I can actually collaborate with Frida to express my ideas in painting.”

Dr James McCann, assistant professor at the Robotics Institute added: “Frida is a project exploring the intersection of human and robotic creativity.

“Frida is using the kind of AI models that have been developed to do things like caption images and understand scene content and applying it to this artistic generative problem.”