Leonardo a Contemporary Artwork by Dave Graham

Dave Graham introduced “Leonardo a Contemporary Artwork,” a unique project born from his solo AI lab exploring AI for fun rather than typical work applications. He sought to create something distinct from revenue-driven AI, choosing art as his medium. Specifically, he decided to use AI to generate art inspired by historical figures, selecting Leonardo da Vinci due to his 15th-century origins, which mitigated concerns about impersonating a living individual. The aim was to coalesce tools and ideas to produce recognizable artistic artifacts.

The project, which began five months prior, involves feeding a vector database with da Vinci’s actual writings and codices. A deliberate design choice was to make the process slow, allowing the AI’s creations to mature cyclically over time, taking six-hour cycles for its “production” phase. Concurrently, a faster UAT process runs six times quicker, recycling hourly, enabling the testing of new code and models. This autonomous “chimera” machine has no predefined end state, continuing to run until manually stopped. It incorporates drift detection, observation, theorization, and play, with weighted values assigned to activities to maintain balance, and autonomously selects models for different tasks, falling back on robust frontier models if needed.

Graham highlighted that this AI harness could be adapted for other historical figures or enterprise workloads, serving as a platform for practical research into AI system capabilities, failure points, and the coexistence of AI and humanity. The system records all its output to a private GitHub repository, maintaining a comprehensive “codex” of its creations, and even mimics da Vinci’s tendency to leave works unfinished. Ongoing evaluation and fixes are managed through the rapid UAT cycles. Looking forward, Graham anticipates the AI discovering new “friendships” and incorporating more of da Vinci’s real-life context, potentially exploring multimodal art forms like 3D sculpture, ultimately pondering the trajectory of an “immortal” Leonardo.