Harold Cohen

British-born artist who created AARON, a long-running art-making program and a landmark of AI artAI art, n.: Images, music or other artworks made with the help of AI — from early computer drawing programs to today's prompt-based image generators — and the debate over whether and how such work counts as art.. An established abstract painter who represented Britain at the 1966 Venice Biennale, he moved to the University of California, San Diego, in 1968, learned to program, and began AARON in the early 1970s, partly as a guest scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Unlike later generative modelsgenerative model, n.: A model that learns what a kind of data looks like — faces, sentences, songs — well enough to produce new examples that resemble the originals without copying them. trained on images, AARON was a rule-based systemrule-based system, n.: A computer system that makes decisions by following a list of 'if… then…' rules written by people, rather than by learning from examples. encoding Cohen's own knowledge of drawing: it produced original line drawings, at first abstract and from the 1980s depicting plants and people, and from 1995 colored its own images, executed by a small drawing robot ('turtle'), plotters and later a custom painting machine. Cohen developed it for over four decades and showed its work at major museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1979) and the Tate Gallery (1983). His essays on whether AARON was creative anticipated later debates over machine authorship in generative artgenerative art, n.: Art in which the artist invents a process — dice rolls, software, written instructions — and lets that process make the work; the phrase now also loosely covers pictures from AI image generators..