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This Robot Wants to Paint Your Portrait—With or Without You

This “high tech tracing machine” can paint portraits with humans or finish through an auto-complete function.

Images courtesy the artists

While Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have been fretting over our future artificially intelligent robotic overlords, technology artist Pindar Van Arman has been exploring the kinder side of robotics. In fact, he’s been doing that for the better part of the last ten years.

With bitPaintr, he’s building an “artistic robot” that allows users to paint portraits with a touchscreen and some help from artificial intelligence.

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Van Arman’s bitPaintr robot paints portraits using a brush on canvas. To do this, the “high-tech tracing machine,” as he calls it, uses artificial intelligence and audience input to trace a portrait with a robotic paint brush on a touchscreen tablet. This, Van Arman says, does away with the whole pencil and paper sketching technique that artists have used for hundreds and hundreds of years.

“Each portrait begins when a user takes a selfie with the tablet,” he explains. “The selfie then appears on the touchscreen where lines can be traced over it. Whenever a line is drawn, the robot dips its brush into paint and replicates the stroke on a canvas.”

And if the audience isn’t offering the robot input, bitPaintr switches into autocomplete mode, comparing the photo showing the painting’s progress to plan its next brushstrokes.

“Portraits that are produced by this machine end up being a complex collaboration between audience participation and the robot’s own artificial intelligence algorithms,” Van Arman explains. “It is not uncommon for the two to influence each other throughout the creation of a portrait.”

“Friends have joked with me that I invented a really slow, really bad printer, a Rube-Goldberg device of sorts,” he adds. “Instead of creating photorealistic replicas in seconds like a printer, my robots paint with a brush over the course of hours, make loads of mistakes, and splatter paint everywhere. It’s a mess, but a charming mess made by a robot trying to make art the way humans do. It’s ridiculous.”

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Van Arman encourages anyone interested in having their portrait painted by the bitPaintr robot to check out his Kickstarter page or his website.

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