Meet UMA: The AI-robot that creates art with help of a human muse

Let’s Talk About - UMA (Universal Machine Artist)

Not the most famous Uma – the actress, right? Not even anything Indian, I presume. Tell me.
Not at all. This Uma is a robot created by artificial intelligence company Umnai. It’s actually an acronym for Universal Machine Artist.

A machine artist? But last month we had Christie’s selling a painting done by an artificial intelligence programme for almost half a million dollars.

Yes. But this one is somewhat different. Uma collaborated with Maltese artist Mark Mallia.

Collaborated? How?
You see, Mallia is actually teaching the programme. He has worked with it for three months now. This is more like human inspired artificial intelligence or AI using the human as a muse.

A human muse for a robot? How can that work? Robots are essentially algorithms not given to musing, or are they?
This is how it worked. Mallia had painted an image of two women, titled Agnes and Ingrid. Now Uma has created an interpretation of the same.


And does it look anything like art?
If you ask me, I would say it looks quite arty. And it sold for Euro 17500.

Sold already? Where?
At the Malta Blockchain Awards last week. The two paintings were displayed side by side.

But for much less than what Christie’s Got for the AI painting it sold.
Yes, but this is a robot that is learning from a human, mimicking the learning process. The AI painting sold by Christie’s, was created by Paris art collective ‘Obvious’ and they had fed information from 15,000 paintings into it, before it started to draw.

More like an adult AI. Uma is like a child robot. Let’s keep an eye on it. We could buy some before Uma becomes too famous.