The End User: Aaron vs. Picasso
Software Prompts Question: Can a Computer Truly Create? International Herald Tribune article on AARON.
Originally published Monday, June 11 at The International Herald Tribune. Published on KurzweilAI.net November 2, 2001.
PARIS -Now comes AARON, a program that creates original paintings on your screen, one after another, each one different from all the others everywhere. What's more, each one could be a real painting by a real person. Aaron is an amazing program that has made me think again about what computers can and cannot do and about what we mean by creativity. That and the monkeys. I'll get to them in a moment.
Computers, as we know, are fantastic machines that we call on every day to make the magical ordinary. But they can do much more than the quotidian tasks we usually put before them - word processing, spreadsheets and instantaneous communication, research and commerce across vast distances. From time to time it's worthwhile to explore the outer boundaries of their abilities.
Aaron is a 30-year project by a British artist, Henry Cohen, whose real paintings have been exhibited widely and who also teaches in the department of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego. He has captured his ideas about painting and color and form and composition and so forth in a collection of rules that Aaron implements. The results are remarkable. Hard copies of Aaron's paintings have been exhibited in museums.
Complete article at The International Herald Tribune.
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