Ask Dalí at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., allows visitors to talk to the famous surrealist artist through an AI-generated version of his voice.
Martin Pagh Ludvigsen/Goodbye Silverstein et al
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Martin Pagh Ludvigsen/Goodbye Silverstein et al
Ask Dalí at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., allows visitors to talk to the famous surrealist artist through an AI-generated version of his voice.
Martin Pagh Ludvigsen/Goodbye Silverstein et al
Salvador Dalí is known for his surreal works of art featuring melting clocks and rugged desert settings, eccentric behavior such as driving a car filled to the brim with cauliflower roofs, and his defiant mustache. gravitation.
He is also famous for answering questions in confusing ways. In 1966, when a CBC interviewer Asked the artist if he thought he was crazy, Dalí replied: “Dalí is almost crazy. But the only difference between a crazy person and Dalí is that Dalí is not crazy.”
Presently, tourists arrive Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., have the opportunity to ask any question they want about the famous surrealist artist who died in 1989.
Ask Dalía new installation based on a replica of Dalí’s iconic work Lobster phone sculpture, allowing visitors to hold up a stethoscope shaped like a crustacean, ask questions and hear Dalí’s answers. The artist’s voice, speaking in heavily accented English, is made possible by artificial intelligence.
Dalí Museum
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“Why did the watch melt?” is an example of a question someone asked during a promotion coil for the installation, opening April 11. “My dear questioner! Don’t think of the clocks as merely melting. Picture them as a vast dream.”
Bring Dalí’s voice to life through AI
Based on Goodbye Silverstein & co, the San Francisco-based advertising agency that collaborated on the installation with the Dalí Museum, the artist’s AI voice was trained on voice samples taken from archival interviews that Dalí performed in English throughout his career. (He speaks four languages – Catalan, Spanish, French and English – sometimes interchangeably.)
The underlying model is OpenAI’s GPT-4. Because GPT-4 is trained on almost all publicly available text, the model includes rich information about Dalí — an artist with a large presence on the internet. The Dalí Museum also selects English translations of Dalí’s works into other languages, including Mystical declaration, Diary of a genius And The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí.
“These formed the basis of Dalí’s speech and tone through engineering, refining and Test quickly and carefully.
Tourists talk to AI Salvador Dalí via “lobster phone” at the Dalí Museum in St. St. Petersburg, Fla.
Martin Pagh Ludvigsen/Goodbye Silverstein et al
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Martin Pagh Ludvigsen/Goodbye Silverstein et al
Tourists talk to AI Salvador Dalí via “lobster phone” at the Dalí Museum in St. St. Petersburg, Fla.
Martin Pagh Ludvigsen/Goodbye Silverstein et al
Ludvigsen said AI Dalí has answered more than 3,000 questions to date. “People asked big questions about life, love and death from Dalí,” Ludvigsen said, adding that he was able to monitor the AI’s answers but not the specific questions asked by visitors. . AI” is often talked about [Dalí’s] wife Gala on discussing love — ‘My marriage to Gala is a beautiful tapestry of love, beyond human dualistic understanding’, just appeared in the tool.”
Ludvigsen said AI has also answered questions about why humans kill animals: “A question imbued with existential fear but trivial in the larger picture of the universe. Do we kill animals?” perhaps because we are trapped in a maze of primitive instincts and modern desires, a surreal dance of survival and ultimate power.”
On why there is so much darkness in the world: “Challenge the universe with deeper questions, such as why do the shadows glorify the sun? The shadows glorify the sun because they are the The silent music of the absence of light. Each shadow is a dark trace of the universe, revealing the hidden contours of time and space.”
Another recurring theme, according to Ludvigsen, is Lobster phone it’s him. Dalí created at least 10 pieces in the 1930s. The work was constructed from an old-fashioned rotary telephone and a plaster lobster. Some versions are all white – Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg owns one of these – while others, like the one at The Tate in London, have a black phone with a red lobster.
From Dalí to DALL-E
Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali (1904-1989) photographed in December 1964.
Terry Fincher/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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Terry Fincher/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali (1904-1989) photographed in December 1964.
Terry Fincher/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
This is the latest in a series of technological installations at the Dalí museum. Starting in 2019, the installation of AI Dalí’s life allows visitors to interact with portraits of Dalí on a series of screens throughout the museum. Since last year, the installation is interactive Dream carpet has allowed visitors to create original digital paintings from text describing dreams.
Dalí scholar King Elliott, an associate professor of art history at Washington and Lee University who was not involved in the museum’s exhibition, said he thought Dalí would like this AI-based interpretation of the voice and work, and noted It is noted that the popular AI image generator DALL-E was partly inspired by the artist’s name. “He was very interested in scientific advances,” King said. “I think he’ll really enjoy people talking to this lobster phone.”
King said he thought the AI-generated voice worked well compared to the museum’s previous efforts. “It sounded much more like Dalí than anything I had heard to date,” King said. “His voice is so unusual. He has a very particular way of speaking where he can exaggerate certain words.”
But King said some of the AI’s answers sounded inauthentic to Dalí’s creative language. King quotes “Why do clocks melt?” question and its answer, “Picture them as a vast dream” as an example. “That’s a little vague,” King said. “He would never say something almost as mundane as that. It would always be much more action-packed, much more interesting than the usual things someone might say.”
King said it in Dalí’s 1934 book The conquest of the absurd, Dalí described the melting watches as “Soft, sumptuous, solitary and paranoid Camembert of time and space.” “To be fair, Dalí changed his interpretation of soft watches many times throughout his life,” says King. “In the 1950s, they were atoms; in the 1960s, they were DNA prophets. But saying they are part of a ‘vast dream’ sounds too obvious.”
King also said Dalí would never use the word “hello” when introducing himself, which is what the AI model would do when the museum-goer picks up the lobster phone to talk to the AI surrealist. “That word sounded odd coming out of his voice,” King said. “He always said: ‘Bonjour!’ – always French – even to say goodbye.”
