The Genesis of Pixelated Imagination: What Was the First AI-Generated Image?
When we think of AI-generated images today, we picture jaw-dropping, hyper-realistic photos, epic fantasy landscapes, or slick digital art conjured up in seconds by typing a simple text prompt.
However, the history of artificial intelligence making art goes back much further than you might think. Long before modern neural networks and diffusion models, the very first AI-generated images were born out of code, creativity, and a computer program named AARON.
Meet AARON: The World’s First AI Artist
The story of the first AI-generated image begins in the late 1960s and early 1970s, conceptualized by Harold Cohen, a painter and professor who taught at the University of California, San Diego.
Unlike today’s AI, which learns by scanning billions of images scraped from the internet, Cohen’s program didn’t use machine learning or neural networks. Instead, it was built on symbolic, rule-based programming (often referred to in computer science history as “Good Old-Fashioned AI”).
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