An artist taught 3 'Black Mirror'-style robot dogs to paint – and now they're the stars of an art exhibition
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- Three robots dogs are starting a four-month artist residency in Australia, The Guardian reported.
- They have their own studio with docking stations where the Boston Dynamics robot dogs can "sleep".
- It's being run by Agnieszka Pilat, a former SpaceX resident artist, who "trained" the dogs to paint.
Three robot dogs created by Boston Dynamics are part of an exhibition at an art gallery in Australia.
Akin to the robot dogs seen in the Netflix hit "Black Mirror", they were first revealed in 2015 and quickly went viral. The first video of them garnered more than 22 million views, per CNN.
The four-month residency at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne is being run by artist Agnieszka Pilat, who trained the dogs, The Guardian reported.
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The studio has docking stations where the robots, named Basia, Vanya and Bunny, can "sleep," along with cubes containing QR codes that tell the robots their location, per the report.
"The National Gallery of Victoria's team has been amazing to work with, and I'm especially grateful for the museum's curator Ewan Mceoin for placing such faith in me," Pilat told Business Insider. "This has been a great team effort and it's an honor to promote a nuanced future technology can have for humanity."
Polish-born Pilat even treats one of the dogs as a pet and takes it for walks around New York, according to the Guardian.
"I know people think, the robots are coming," she told the outlet. "No – they're awkward, they're like little kids."
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Some of the robotic dogs can speak after Boston Dynamics partnered with AI-software company Levatas to integrate OpenAI's ChatGPT into its robots called Spot. The robots can listen and respond verbally to humans using Google Assistant's voice technology, Fast Company reported.
The feature is not yet commercially available, but some of its other capabilities include carrying out "missions" such as identifying leaks and spillage and highlighting equipment damage in the manufacturing and logistics industry.
Pilat was an artist-in-residence at Boston Dynamics from 2020 to 2021, before starting another residency at Space X, according to her website.
"Machines are humanity's children," she says on her site. "I am just giving them a page in a family album."
Johannes Simon
The Spot dogs aren't the first robot artists to get their own show. In 2021 humanoid robot Ai-Da held an exhibition at the Design Museum in London.
Created by Engineered Arts, the company behind the viral humanoid robot Ameca, Ai-Da can paint and draw using her camera eyes, robotic arm and AI algorithms.
The robot also had an exhibition at the Concilio Europeo Dell'Arte in the Giardini in Italy last year.