Who Invented AI Generated Art? Complete History from Harold Cohen's AARON to DALL-E & GANs (2026)
AI-generated art represents one of the most fascinating intersections of technology and creativity, transforming how we understand artistic expression in the digital age. The history of AI art begins with British artist Harold Cohen, who pioneered the field in the late 1960s by developing AARON, the first autonomous art-generating computer program. AARON's debut in 1973 marked a revolutionary moment, as it could create original artworks using rule-based algorithms without human intervention during the creative process. The evolution from AARON's simple line drawings to today's sophisticated AI art systems spans over five decades of technological advancement. The journey includes major milestones like Alan Turing's foundational work on machine intelligence in 1950, John McCarthy coining "artificial intelligence" in 1955, and the development of neural networks in the 1980s. The modern era of AI art began with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) introduced in 2014, followed by Google's DeepDream in 2015, and culminating with DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion transforming creative industries since 2020. Today, AI-generated art has achieved mainstream recognition, with pieces selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars at major auction houses.
