When I first explored AI art, I was surprised to learn that algorithmic and automatically generated art has fascinated artists for centuries.
Back then, ancient Greek artists followed simple yet strict rules to draw mesmerizing maze-like patterns called meanders onto ceramic mugs and plates.
At the same time, fractals and recursive patterns, now mostly associated with computer graphics, were woven into textiles that enveloped human bodies and formed jewelry that spiraled around their wrists and necks.
Around this period, Hero of Alexandria wrote Automata, detailing functional mechanical theaters and hydraulic devices.
One such automaton theater could perform a multi-minute puppet show, with characters animated by a system of ropes, accompanied by drum-produced sound effects—all not powered by electrical circuits, but driven solely by the silent force of gravity.
Recursion was also a foundational principle in Islamic art, giving rise to intricate geometric tiling, tessellations, and flowing arabesques.
In the 8th century, the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun adorned his palace in Baghdad with a silver and gold mechanical tree, where metal birds sang automatically from swaying branches.
In the 9th century, the Banu Musa brothers invented an automatic flute player, considered one of the earliest programmable machines. Powered by steam, the device produced flute sounds and allowed users to adjust its settings to create different musical patterns.
Clockwork automata flourished in Renaissance Europe between the 15th and 17th centuries.
Complex mechanized figures, automaton clocks, and animated tableaux became prominent expressions of early “algorithmic” kinetic art.
One striking example is the astronomical clock in Prague, built in 1410.
Johann Kirnberger’s Musical Dice Game of 1757 is considered an early example of a generative system based on randomness.
Dice were used to select musical sequences from a numbered pool of previously composed phrases.
But for me, the story of automatically generated art truly comes to life with the emergence of autonomous drawing machines—most notably the Draughtsman, developed by Pierre Jaquet-Droz together with his son Henri-Louis and Jean-Frédéric Leschot between 1768 and 1774.
Just imagine sitting at a table with a little porcelain-white boy, his face locked in a frozen, lifeless stare, lips curled into a faint, unsettling smile that never touches his hollow, empty eyes.
Next to him sits a tiny inkwell, the delicate quill lying motionless in his pale, rigid hand. You stare into his hollow gaze—and then, from deep within his clockwork chest, you hear a faint, almost organic click.
His tiny hand begins to move with lifelike precision, each stroke whispering echoes of a forgotten past, as if some restless ghost were reaching out, desperate to reveal something long buried.
Because he must obey.
Because he must draw.
Stroke by stroke, the pale paper surrenders to the ink. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, shapes begin to emerge—curves, shadows, contours. What begins as nothing becomes something disturbingly familiar.
A face. Regal. Haunting.
The ghostly image of a king emerges from the void.
It is Louis XV, untouched by time, by death, by decay. Drawn from the trembling hand of a child who never lived, and who will never die—condemned for all eternity to bring his king back to life, over and over, in a loop of perfect, obedient misery.
But yeah… to be fair, the little boy doesn’t just produce haunted kings—he can also draw a dog, a royal couple, and even a Cupid scene. And he isn’t entirely alone in his mechanical eternity; beside him stand some equally tireless companions, including the Musician, a woman-shaped automaton who plays the organ with the same lifeless, obedient precision, and another boy who endlessly writes custom letters—some of which, read HELP ;0
But the story doesn’t end in that 18th-century workshop. It continues.
Maillardet’s automaton, created around 1800, pushed the boundaries further, capable of producing multiple intricate drawings and even writing poems, expanding the mechanical imagination beyond mere portraits.
The 19th century becomes the golden age of mechanical music—an era when music boxes, orchestrions, barrel organs, and player pianos fill salons, streets, and grand ballrooms with melodies performed not by human hands, but by intricate machines.
These devices no longer need gears alone but evolve into systems driven by punched cards, pinned cylinders, and perforated paper rolls. Their compositions become complex, layered, and repeatable—combinatorial engines of sound where a simple change of the input medium reshapes the entire performance.
No longer bound to a single king’s portrait or a solitary melody, these machines hint at an unsettling future where art, once the domain of fragile human touch, can now be summoned by mechanism, electricity, and mathematics, endlessly repeating, endlessly perfect, endlessly detached from the warmth of breath and flesh.
In the early 1950s, Christopher Strachey used the Ferranti Mark 1—the world’s first commercially available stored-program digital computer—to create some of the earliest examples of computer-generated art. Strachey programmed the Mark 1 to play a medley including God Save the King, Baa Baa Black Sheep, and In the Mood. In 1952, he also developed a love letter generator.
Illiac Suite (1957), later retitled String Quartet No. 4, is widely considered the first musical score composed by a computer. Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson programmed the ILLIAC I at the University of Illinois to generate material for the piece, which features four movements—each experimenting with different aspects of composition, from melody and harmony to rhythm and generative algorithms like Markov chains.
In 1959, German mathematician Theo Lutz programmed a computer to generate stochastic texts, marking an early exploration of computer-generated poetry.
In 1964, Jeanne Hays Beaman and four other female artists, together with Paul Le Vasseur, created a dance-randomization computer program. By inputting 20 variations each of time, space, and movement, the computer generated around 70 text-based dance sequences in just four minutes.
In 1965, inventor Ray Kurzweil developed software capable of recognizing musical patterns and synthesizing new compositions from them. The computer first appeared on the quiz show I’ve Got a Secret that same year.
In February 1965, Frieder Nake and Georg Nees presented some of the world’s first computer-generated graphics, created using the newly introduced Zuse Graphomat Z64 plotter. Nees’s exhibition, titled Computer Graphik, was held at the Study Gallery of Stuttgart College, marking one of the earliest public presentations of computer art.
In 1966, Nees extended his work into computer sculptures, using programs to control milling machines that produced sculptural forms instead of traditional workpieces. His computer-generated sculptures and graphics were later exhibited at the 1969 Nuremberg Biennale.
This period coincided with the rise of conceptual art in the 1960s, where the idea or concept behind the work took precedence over the execution. Artists embraced the notion that the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
Computer art, with its reliance on pre-programmed rules and generative systems, was increasingly grouped under the emerging umbrella of post-conceptual art—a movement that extended conceptual art’s legacy by embracing algorithmic, generative, and computational methods as legitimate artistic processes.
Around the beginning of the 1970s, AARON became popular.
AARON is the name for a series of computer programs developed by artist Harold Cohen to autonomously create original artistic images, distinguishing it from earlier programs that relied heavily on human input.
Emerging from Cohen’s central question, “What are the minimum conditions under which a set of marks functions as an image?”, AARON was continuously developed from 1972 through the 2010s.
In 1981, David Cope was commissioned to compose an opera but struggled with severe writer’s block. To overcome it, he began developing Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI) on an Apple desktop computer, aiming to analyze and replicate his own compositional style. Eight years later, with EMI’s assistance, he completed the opera in just two days.
Building on this success, Cope adapted EMI to emulate the styles of other composers, including Bartók, Brahms, Chopin, Gershwin, Joplin, Mozart, and Prokofiev. This work led to the release of Bach by Design, an album of computer-composed music performed by a Disklavier. His following album, Classical Music Composed by Computer, featured works performed by human musicians. In 1984, a program named RACTER (short for “raconteur”) authored the book The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed, a collection of surreal poems and prose. Aside from the introduction by its human creator (William Chamberlain), the book’s content was “entirely written by a computer program”– the first book ever credited to an AI author.
In the early 1990s, simple prototypes for computer-generated puns were developed using natural language generation systems such as VINCI. In 1994, Graeme Ritchie and Kim Binsted introduced JAPE (Joke Analysis and Production Engine), a program designed to generate question-answer-type puns from a general, non-humorous lexicon.
In 1999, Scott Draves and a team of engineers created Electric Sheep, a free, open-source screensaver and volunteer computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames. The system used AI to generate endless animations that evolved by learning from user preferences across a network of connected computers.
In 2001, Draves was awarded the Fundación Telefónica Life 4.0 prize for Electric Sheep.
In 2002, Lynn Hershman Leeson created Agent Ruby, an artificial intelligence web character commissioned by SFMOMA for its online platform e.space. Designed as an “e-dream portal,” Agent Ruby could converse with online users, with these interactions shaping her memory, knowledge, and moods over time. The interactive, multiuser work also served as an expanded cinema element of Hershman Leeson’s film Teknolust, featuring Ruby as a female face with shifting expressions who chats with users and searches the internet to expand her knowledge.
Simon Colton’s project The Painting Fool was developed throughout the 2000s as an AI “artist” capable of generating portraits and imitating various styles and moods. Colton, a computer scientist, aimed to explore the creative potential of artificial intelligence through this work.
In 2014, Stephanie Dinkins began Conversations with Bina48, a project in which she recorded dialogues with BINA48, a social robot modeled after a middle-aged Black woman. In 2019, Dinkins received the Creative Capital award for her development of an evolving artificial intelligence based on the cultures and interests of people of color.
In 2015, Sougwen Chung initiated Mimicry (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1), an ongoing collaboration between the artist and a robotic arm.
In 2019, Chung received the Lumen Prize for her performances with the robotic arm, which uses AI to mimic her drawing style.
In 2018, Christie’s in New York auctioned the AI-generated artwork Edmond de Belamy, created by the Paris-based collective Obvious. The piece sold for USD 432,500, far exceeding its estimate of USD 7,000–10,000.
In 2023, an AI-generated photograph titled The Electrician won a Sony World Photography Award—one of the most prestigious prizes in the field. It was later revealed that the image had been generated using AI as part of a provocation by the artist, who declined the prize to spark discussion about the authenticity and emotional impact of AI-generated art.
In 2024, the Japanese film GenerAIdoscope was released, co-directed by Hirotaka Adachi, Takeshi Sone, and Hiroki Yamaguchi. All video, audio, and music in the film were created using AI.
In 2025, the Japanese anime television series Twins Hinahima was released. The series was produced and animated with AI assistance, particularly during the process of cutting and converting photographs into anime-style illustrations, which were later refined by art staff. Most characters and logos were still hand-drawn using various software.
From ancient drawing rules to mechanical puppets to AI systems crafting music, text, and images—the story of AI art is not just technological, but a reflection of human imagination extending into machines.
Each generation blurs the line between tool and author, algorithm and artist. And the journey continues, inviting us to ask: why AI art at all?