Robot Dog Artists Are Taking Work Away From Hard Working Humans

NY Post - Pilat, who was born in Poland and now lives in the U.S., spent months teaching three of these four-legged machines named Basia, Vanya and Bunny to hold a paintbrush in their “mouths” and move them across a large canvas, turning the paint into abstract art. 

They use sensors, cameras and artificial intelligence to perceive and navigate their surroundings.

Pilat said she first became fascinated by the robot dogs when she saw them on YouTube. She contacted Boston Dynamics and asked if she could collaborate with them. The company agreed and taught her how to use the robot dogs. She then painted a few portraits of one of them before she started actively working with them as her creative companions. 

The robots have been rewarded with a four-month residency at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia, where they are creating art in their custom-built studio. 

The exhibit is called “Heterobota,” and the robots are fully autonomous. Pilat says this was a significant shift in her practice. Previously, she was always in the studio with the robots, where they felt more like an extension of her arm.

To navigate the space, the robots rely on little cubes of QR codes that are scattered about the space. When they need to rest and recharge, they return to their docking stations. Pilat worked with engineers and the museum to bring her vision to life. The result is a series of 36 paintings that resemble human works of art. 

Some of these paintings have sold for up to $40,000 at auction.

The robots can be seen painting, navigating their environment and self-charging in the show, which runs until April 7. The exhibition’s theme is generative AI. Pilat said a language is embedded in the 16 symbols featured in the paintings.

Making it in the art world is hard enough without competing against robots. Just imagine being a struggling artist. You have an incredible god given ability to paint beautiful works of art. Everyone loves your colorful lines and dots that look like they could have been painted by a 6th grader. You've worked tirelessly your entire life to perfect your abstract bullshit. Yet still, you're living in a flat in Melbourne with 3 random roommates you found on Australian Craigslist. You're still broke as shit. Every once in a while you sell a piece that holds you over for a month or so, but it's not enough to live off of. You're still working at Starbucks to make ends meet.

But then imagine that an opportunity presents itself at the National Gallery of Victoria. They start buying your paintings on a more frequent basis. Things are starting to come together for you. If you can keep this up you might finally be able hang up the Starbucks apron all together. But then out of nowhere the purchases stop. You pay a visit to the gallery to see what's going on, and you find your lines and dots exhibit has been replaced by a series of lines and dots done by this broad's robot dog.

Advertisement

If it hasn't been made adundantly clear by my first two paragraphs, I have no idea how the art world works. But I do know the more robot dog exhibits that pop up  ginalleries, the less room they'll have for human-made exhibits. That must to be tough to swallow for my hypothetical struggling artist. It must be wildly discouraging for everybody in the art world. 

The woman responsible for this goes by Pilat. You can tell she's important because she only goes by one name. Pilat should be public enemy #1 to artists everywhere. The National Gallery of Victoria should be as well. They're spending $40k on AI art? Art that is, again, literally just lines and dots. That's madness. 

The rules to art are very stupid. The entire art economy is held up by a house of cards. It's all a racket, none of it makes sense, and I'm pretty sure everyone involved is just laundering money. Banksy once sold a self-destructing painting for a million dollars. After the art self-destructed and shredded itself into a million pieces, it was resold for $27 million. Why? Dennis Reynolds sums it up nicely. Dennis said, "Art is an ambiguous thing. Just becasue you make some art, it doesn't mean you're an artist. But also it does mean you're an artist. But does it mean that art is good art? Is art good just because the right people say it's good? Yes. Yes, that's how it works"

Also he wasn't raped. 

The way I see it, artists have a couple of options. I think someone can take advantage of the situation. Somebody needs to steal Pilat's robot art dog. If Pilat is smart, she'll be in on it. Robot art dog is clearly next up. But he needs a scandal to take him to the next level. If we stage a robot dog kidapping, his paintings will skyrocket in value. Then you hold the robot dog hostage in a secret basement, and force him to paint a new piece once every few months (you can't flood the market). Yo then sell the art on the deep web so that nobody can track where we are. I guarantee if the robot dog is kidnapped, but his paintings are still hitting the market, those paintings would start going for millions. The dumbass art world will eat that scandal up. Billionaires across the world will bend over backwards to get their hands on the kidnapped paintings. 

Advertisement

I guess that doesn't solve the problem or anything. That's just an idea I had to make a quick buck. You could also just buy a robot dog artist of your own. I'm not sure if this is the exact same model, but it looks like these Boston Dynamics robot dogs go for around $75k.

Sell two paintings and you've already made a return on your investment. Except as stupid as the art world is, you could buy the same damn model of dog, have it paint the exact same style of painting, and the Pilat's of the world will tell you it's not worth shit. Because for some reason your robot dog isn't the artistic genius her's is.

Or thirdly, we can destroy the dog. Somebody should probably destroy that dog. Robot dog artist's are a slippery slope. We've already seen AI art take over the internet. For something like $20/month you can have AI create whatever fucked up picture you want it to. 

It would be one thing if Pilat's robot dog was painting really cool, impressive pieces. Like if it painted a sick dinosaur, or re-did the Mona Lisa except with bigger cans. But we can't let the robots do abstract art. Abstract art is all nonsene. Any robot can paint bullshit like that. If we're going to use robot dogs, we should at least require they do cool stuff.

Sorry I'm not really sure what the point of that blog was. It just seems crazy that we're giving this robot art the time of day. I would think the art world would be extremely anti AI. But apparenlty not. Apparently it's all the rage. Good luck to all human artists out there. You're competing with robots now.