For the discussion of this series of work on Forbes click here.

For the paper presented at “Art Machines 2” see here

AIMADE is a series of artworks made by British artist Celyn Bricker in collaboration with Mexican architect Arturo Muela. In this series they explore the question ‘should robots pay tax?’, along with broader concerns around AI, technological unemployment and the relationship between AI and creativity.

In Mexico it is possible to pay taxes with artwork. The artists decided use this as an opportunity to explore the questions surrounding AI, and so worked with a ‘third artist’ – an AI neural network – to create artwork that was then used to pay tax. In this case, the AI used was trained to generate images from textual sources, in either English or Spanish. In the AIMADE series, the texts range from possibly the earliest description of a robot found in the Chinese text Liezi, to statements from contemporary figures like Elon Musk and Gary Kasparov.

The first edition of the AIMADE series was accepted into the Mexican National Collection in early 2020, the first time a National Government has confirmed images produced by AI can be legally defined as ‘art’.