BBC archive shows 1996 AARON AI painting episode

The episode shows that the idea of a machine making art is not new. AARON was a set of computer programs written by the artist Harold Cohen that autonomously generated original artistic images, and the program is described as a forerunner of generative AI. What the broadcast captures is a different working method from today's image generators: AARON did not output a finished picture but drew lines one after another, and the process continued off-screen, where a robot redrew the same picture on a physical surface, mixing colors and applying paint. The episode also traces the program's development. Its early works were squiggly and hard to interpret, and Cohen later gave it "knowledge about reality," after which it began producing art of its own that was more grounded in the real world. Cohen's own account is that he had long worked in art and came to believe that artists can do many things without understanding what is actually happening, so he tried to understand through a computer what he could not understand as a painter — only to conclude for a time that it was impossible and would never work.