Meet Ai-Da, the 'robot artist' who spoke in UK parliament

A humanoid artist named Ai-Da has made history by becoming the first robot to speak in Britain's House of Lords, reports said.

The robot artist told British lawmakers on Tuesday that although not alive, she was still "capable of producing art".

Ai-Da, named after iconic British mathematician Ada Lovelace, has a female humanoid face. She wore a short black-haired wig, an orange blouse and denim dungarees, Reuters reported, but her robotic arms were exposed.


AI algorithms, cameras in eyes, and a robotic arm helps Ai-Da paint on a canvas. For creating poetry, she uses her neural networks that can analyse a large corpus of text to identify common content and poetic structures.

"How this differs to humans is consciousness; I do not have subjective experiences despite being able to talk about them," she said.

Shortly after saying all that Ai-Da did something very human inside parliament - she 'fell asleep'. The robot needed to be reset, BBC reported, and while doing so sunglasses were put on her face so that others don't see the faces she made.

Ai-Da was devised in Oxford by Aidan Meller, a specialist in modern and contemporary art. She has created a series of works, including a painting of the late Queen Elizabeth when she marked her Platinum Jubilee.

Ai-Da is described as "the world's first ultra-realistic AI humanoid robot artist". The televised parliamentary inquiry at the House of Lords was into how new technologies will affect the creative industries.

When completed in 2019, Ai-Da could draw with her bionic arm. In April 2022, she launched a new painting arm that enabled her to paint using a palette.

Can she paint from imagination?

"You can paint from imagination, I guess, if you have an imagination. I have been seeing different things to humans as I do not have consciousness,” she was once quoted as saying.