Fascinating Look Back at AARON, the AI Computer Painter from 1996 Who Took Seven Hours to Finish One Sheet

Sally Gray flew to San Diego in December 1996 for a children’s science show with a name that already sounded like a dare. It’ll Never Work had sent her to the visual arts department at the University of California, and the brief was odd even by the standards of that series. She was supposed to meet one of the most important young painters alive. His name was AARON. He was 23. His work had already hung in serious galleries. He was also a computer program, and Gray introduced him that way on purpose, as if the hardware were a student who had grown up in the department.

Harold Cohen, the British painter who invented AARON, was present as the program’s mentor, you might say. Cohen had spent a lifetime at the easel and had encountered the frustrating-when-you-think-about-it truth that many painters are aware of, namely that there are a lot of things they do that they simply cannot explain. He suspected that a machine could force certain habits into the open. After a while of attempting to get it to function, he effectively gave up on the project and declared it a lost cause, using nearly the same terms as the software title. Gray asked him to demonstrate that AARON was capable of creating a quality painting. Cohen dismissed that as “trivial,” though he did eventually allow AARON to take a shot.

Cohen’s own canvases sold for a small fortune at the time. He’d essentially given the program a tiny set of quite basic guidelines about how a painting should be composed. From there, AARON pretty much went off on its own, and no one in the room, including Cohen, could predict what the next painting would look like. A completed composition appeared on a Silicon Graphics screen as lines of code until Cohen thought it was worth printing. Then came the additional task of putting it on paper. A robot arm was used to complete the task, moving across a flat surface, picking up cups and brushes, opening bottles of fabric dye, and combining the exact proper shade for each part. Gray said the step takes about seven hours for a single painting, and it was all done with real paint, not on an office printer.

When AARON first started, the program was much simpler, and Cohen was eager to present the evidence. Gray dismissed AARON’s first marks as “squiggles.” Cohen believed they were a good effort, more akin to a rough landscape or a cave painting than random noise. Knowledge came in small parts. To begin, Cohen informed the program that a human is really just one lump layered on top of another, with a rough facial drawing on the top lump. Over time, this grew to encompass plants, furniture, and rooms. By the mid-1990s, the thing was even placing figures in interiors and coloring them in itself. Cohen believed that AARON had always been competent but had only recently become more advanced. About fifteen years before the BBC interview, he attempted to return to drawing by hand but ended up duplicating the program. He came to a stop swiftly. On the sketching side, he conceded that AARON was actually better than him at the moment, but on the color side, Cohen still had the advantage, and he predicted that the software would take a long time to catch up.

At the time of the broadcast, prints from the painting machine were selling for around £1300. Gray concluded by referring to the 23-year-old program as a potential Picasso of the future century and asking Cohen how he expected AARON to do when he grew older. Cohen noted that such a birthday would require him to live a good while longer, then answered anyway.