AI and art: Aibo, the robot dog

I painted Aibo some 20 years ago because I wanted to own a robot. Among the robots available at the time, both in reality and on film, I liked Aibo the most. Even more than R2-D2. Aibo is still expensive today, so I haven’t bought it yet.

Aibo is in demand because people love it and become attached to it. There are even cemeteries for irreparable Aibos. I heard that scientists programmed it to sometimes obey us and sometimes not, just like real dogs, which are sometimes our best friends. This type of behaviour makes us feel like Aibo is a living being or an intelligent creature.

But if we appreciate intelligent creatures on four legs that wag their tails and only occasionally obey us, perhaps pigs are a better choice. Just as our understanding of intelligence isn’t the clearest, the concept of artificial intelligence also comes into question.

In any case, on a red plastic-structured background, using toxic nitrocellulose lacquer, I painted this plastic creature that stares at a real, screwed-on bone – a relic of another kind of existence – while pondering what to do with it all.