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Lobster Telephone (1938), by the Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, sounds like a plaster sculpture of a lobster connected to a real telephone. It is a surrealist work, an artistic movement known for its dreamlike imagination and unusual juxtapositions. Dalí was one of the most famous artists of this movement.
Now, when visitors visit the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, they are able to experience a replica of the famous telephone up close. They can even pick up the handset and talk to the voice on the other end of the phone.
It wasn't Dalí's soul that answered the phone, but a digital replica of Dalí made using artificial intelligence. The interactive experience, called "Ask Dalí", opened on April 11 to celebrate the artist's 120th birthday.
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In a promotional video, AI Dalí says, "Hello, I'm Salvador Dalí, you can ask me anything. How they brought me here, I can't understand at all. All I know is that they used something called a large language model to reproduce my voice, and then here I am. ”
In the video, Digital Dalí answers various questions from curious visitors about his work, such as why does the clock melt in The Continuation of Memory (1931), why do elephants have thin legs in Elephants (1948), and what is your beard?
The museum partnered with creative agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners (GS&P) to create the AI tool, which is trained on ancient text and archival audio. According to Artnet, it is powered by multiple machine learning models, including OpenAI's GPT-4.
"Ask Dalí" is not the museum's first foray into artificial intelligence. In 2019, the agency launched the "Dalí Life" project, which allows visitors to interact with digital Dalí representations on video screens scattered throughout the building.
The "Ask Dalí" project is also a reference to the innovation of many museums in recent years that have used artificial intelligence technology to arrange exhibitions. Earlier this year, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris hosted an exhibition that included artificial intelligence reproductions of Vincent van Gogh's work. The AI program called "Hello, Vincent" is trained on hundreds of letters and early biographies. The artist is shown on the screen, and visitors ask him questions through a microphone.
Last month, the National World War II Museum in New Orleans hosted an exhibit called "Voices from the Front," where visitors could chat with 18 veterans, nurses, rear workers, and other Americans who lived World War II. When answering visitors' questions, the AI program extracts relevant answers from a large number of pre-recorded interviews and plays them on a large screen.
In contrast, 'Ask Dalí' does not display an image of the artist on the screen, and the digital Dalí simply talks to the masses through the voice of the lobster phone.