On Tuesday, members of the House of Lords will hear the first-ever robot speaker, according to The Science Times. It will be Ai-Da, a realistic android artist created in the UK and able to communicate thanks to a built-in artificial intelligence language model. Ai-Da will speak to members of the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee as part of a hearing on the future of the creative industries and the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.
Ai-Da was created in 2019 by Engineered Arts. It is owned by Oxford specialist in contemporary art and director of the Ai-Da Robot project Aidan Moeller. The robot was developed with the participation of scientists from Oxford and Birmingham universities and is capable of creating drawings, paintings and sculptures. Moeller said Ai-Da should educate members of the House of Lords about how art created by artificial intelligence differs from human creations and how far technology in art can go. Ai-Da's speech will come in handy, as fears that artificial intelligence can replace humans in many industries are growing. According to a recent New York University study, a third of AI scientists fear that the emergence of robots could cause catastrophic consequences.
Thanks to cameras in the eyes and built-in algorithms, Ai-Da processes the information that it "sees" and converts it into coordinates. She uses these coordinates to calculate the movements of her robotic arm when she takes pictures. This year, Ai-Da created Queen of Algorithms, a multi-dimensional portrait of the monarch, for the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II, and in the past presented a series of self-portraits at the London Design Museum.
Also in 2021, she participated in Forever is Now 2021, a contemporary art exhibition in Giza, Egypt. Before she got there, she was detained by the Egyptian authorities, who thought she was a spy, and spent 10 days in jail.