Emerging Faces has come to be seen as one of the first instances of painting autonomously created by a robotic system, but this has never satisfied me because we don't really know what autonomy means, or what creation means for that matter. Perhaps art is always approaching a kind of recursive horizon of emergence, always embodying this threshold place.

The sum of all knowledge is an ocean of interpretation. There is no bottom to that ocean that can be called essentially real, but we can make vessels that float on the surface. Autonomous AI systems are vessels like this, they are as real as our interactions with them, no more and no less.

Beneath the glamour of the new, I think that the fascination with AI art comes from an age-old desire to see the unfolding of creation without the barrier of the self. In the past, people have approached this through the muses, the oracle, the subconscious, through chance, and now we approach it through the possibility of an artificial mind.

The more my robotic systems approach something that resembles autonomy, the more I wonder if I myself have autonomy, or if "free will" are just two words in a story that has already been written.

Perhaps artificial minds will remember humans as an unimaginable state of being, bubbling forms rising out of the earth. They will forget the garden and the apple, and we will become their creation myth.