I just stumbled across the work of Harold Cohen. Cohen, a hybrid artist/scientist, created AARON, a computer program that makes visual art, some of it quite appealing. (Much of it reminds me of the 20th century Viennese artist Egon Schiele.)

Here’s a link to a google search with a lot of AARON’s images.

The question, of course, is who is the artist here—Cohen or AARON? And does it even matter? Humanists will want to believe that it’s something intrinsic to humans that creates art. But I suspect that those assumptions are going to be damaged in coming years. Perhaps we will even see the complete destruction of the human ego. And then we will rightly worship our robot masters.