AARON: The A.I. Artist Created Over 40 Years by Pioneering Painter Harold Cohen
• AARON is an image-generating A.I. software created over 4 decades by British painter Harold Cohen, on view at the Whitney
• Unlike other A.I. art, AARON was designed by an artist to be a creative tool, not a shortcut to make art
• Early AARON works were abstract with simple shapes, colors added by Cohen; software gradually got more sophisticated
• By the 2000s, AARON could autonomously create colorful jungle scenes and portraits in furnished rooms
• Cohen first experimented with robotic art in the 1970s at Stanford A.I. Lab; he improved AARON until his death in 2016