BBC Archive Releases 1996 Program on AARON, The Painting AI
Thirty years before the current generative AI boom, a public broadcaster was already asking whether a machine could make art, and the archive shows how much of today's debate was already on the table.
Reporting from 1 source: GIGAZINE.
The BBC has released an archive episode of the educational program "It'll Never Work?" from December 10, 1996, about AARON, a painting program created by artist Harold Cohen. Host Sally Gray visits Cohen at the University of California, San Diego, where he describes the project, the drawing robot that paints and mixes colors, and AARON's early squiggly output, at times selling for 1300 pounds.
The episode belongs to "It'll Never Work?", which ran on the BBC from 1993 to 1999 and sent hosts to research institutes to test whether new technologies actually worked. AARON draws its images as sequences of lines rather than producing a finished file, so the artwork is completed by a robot that mixes colors and applies paint, a process that takes about seven hours.
Cohen tells Gray that AARON's early work was squiggly and unreadable, and that giving the program knowledge about reality let it produce art more grounded in the world. The program was broadcast on December 10, 1996.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.