The Pixel Pioneers: The Fascinating True Story of the First AI Image
Long before the internet was flooded with hyper-realistic deepfakes, futuristic cyberpunk landscapes, and viral images of the Pope in a puffer jacket, digital creativity had a much more humble—and deeply artistic—beginning.
If you think artificial intelligence art is purely a product of the 2020s, prepare to travel back more than half a century. Welcome to the story of AARON, the computer program that birthed the world’s very first AI-generated images.
Meet the Artist Who Didn’t Draw a Thing
The story of the first AI image isn’t about a tech corporation training a massive neural network on billions of stolen internet photos. Instead, it starts with a single human: Harold Cohen, a successful British-born painter who represented Britain at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 1966.
At the height of his traditional painting career, Cohen experienced a crisis of curiosity. He became fascinated by a radical question: What is the core essence of drawing? Is it just physical muscle memory, or is it a set of cognitive rules?
To answer this, Cohen completely upended his life. In 1968, he took a visiting professorship at the University of California, San Diego, locked himself in a room, and taught himself how to write computer code. He wanted to see if a machine could be taught to think—and draw—like an artist.
Enter AARON: The World’s First AI Painter
By 1973, Cohen had built a software program that would change art history forever: AARON.
Unlike modern AI models that scrape data from the web, AARON didn’t look at existing images, and it certainly didn’t use machine learning in the way we think of it today. Computers back then didn’t have the processing power or internet access for that.
Instead, Cohen painstakingly translated his own deep understanding of art into lines of code. He manually programmed rules for:
- How lines intersect and close into shapes.
- How to balance a composition and manage negative space.
- How to represent three-dimensional human figures and organic botanical elements (like foliage) on a flat two-dimensional surface.
When AARON ran, it wasn’t just blindly following a pre-drawn template. It made autonomous decisions. Cohen provided the rules and connected the software to a custom-built drawing machine (a robotic arm holding a pen), but AARON decided where the lines would go, how shapes would overlap, and what the final composition would look like.
The resulting early prints—consisting of primitive, geometric black-and-white line drawings of abstract figures and botanical shapes—marked the historic birth of true artificial intelligence art.
From Humble Lines to Global Museums
AARON didn’t stay trapped in a 1970s laboratory. Over the next several decades, Cohen continuously updated the software.
As computer technology evolved, AARON evolved with it. In the 1980s and 90s, Cohen taught the program how to handle color, and eventually, how to paint complex, vibrant jungle scenes populated by stylized human figures and lush plants.
AARON’s work became so culturally and historically significant that it was eventually exhibited in world-class institutions like the Tate Modern in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. When Cohen passed away in 2016, he left behind a legacy as a true visionary who saw the intersection of code and canvas decades before anyone else.
Why the First AI Image Still Matters
Today, anyone can type a prompt into an app and generate a masterpiece in seconds. But it’s easy to take that magic for granted.
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