In a unexpected public demonstration of rare AI expertise by the art world, a recent review by the Guardian art critic opined that a portrait of HM Queen Elizabeth II by AI artist Ai-Da “fails to meet the Turing test” (sic) though we are unclear what version of the Turing test he is referring to since the reviewer was only looking at one piece and already knew the piece in question was done by an AI before correctly guessing that it was done by an AI.
He went on to say:
“This delusion works by deliberately ignoring the huge gap between the current state of machine learning and the dream of true AI, which would pass the Turing test and match the complexity of the human mind. Ai-Da is not an artist because she – or rather it – has no independent consciousness.”
Whilst we are doubtless completely comfortable that the critic in question doesn’t LIKE the piece, it would be interesting to see if he could actually follow a Turing-like protocol and point out the human artist in a blind review of human- vs AI-generated pieces. We think it would be fun to watch – like trying to distinguish pictures of real faces or human text from AI generated ones.
Its unclear whether the Guardian critic really dislikes Ai-Da’s style or is uncomfortable that last month, she held her first solo exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale.
When asked for comment about the Critics knowledge of AI, Ai-Da apparently smiled and said he had failed the Turing Test as he did not give a convincing impression of being intelligent, at least not on this particular topic.
