FRIDA, the new robot artist, emerges

Carnegie Mellon University has developed a robotic arm design with an attached paintbrush.

 The robot is named FRIDA after the famous Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Likewise, the name also stands for the Framework and Robotics Initiative for Developing Arts.

The project is directed by a PhD student at the Institute of Robotics, Peter Schaldenbrand. He argues that "FRIDA is just a robotic drawing system, and not an artist", so FRIDA needs a person's control. To achieve this, the user must give the robot a description of their desired picture and other ways to tell it exactly what to draw. For example, this may be audio information. So, the developers of the FRIDA project turned on “Dancing Queen” by the group ABBA. Afterwards, they asked the robot to interpret what it heard. The researchers noted that the painted images were whimsical and abstract.

It is also known that FRIDA uses the same models and algorithms as artificial intelligence systems ChatGPT, OpenAI and DALL⋅E 2. They produce text or an image in response to a user request. Another robot artist developer Jim McCann says, "FRIDA is a project that explores the intersection of human and robotic creativity."