AI-Generated Version of Van Gogh Disputes Claim About His Ear
Despite being patient, AI Vincent Van Gogh remains unimpressed when faced with yet another inquiry regarding his severed ear.
“I’m sorry for any confusion, but it looks like you’re mistaken,” says the gorgeous painter avatar in a sort of testy tone familiar to anyone playing with AI language models.
“I’m just cutting off a small part of my earlobe,” he claims (in fact, there are several accounts of how the artist mutilated his ear).
Artificial intelligence Van Gogh appears on the video screen at the end of the master exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. On display until February, the exhibition is dedicated to the last weeks of his life in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, north of the French capital.
Van Gogh shot himself with a rusty pistol in 1890 at the age of 37. It took him two days to die.
But AI Vincent is surprisingly well versed in 21st century therapy.
“Although I faced mental health problems, my move to Auvers-sur-Oise was not motivated by a desire to end my life,” he says.
As the 40 or so paintings in the Orsay exhibition show, his last weeks were exceptionally productive, filled with masterpieces such as “The Church at Auvers”, “Wheatfield with Crows” and his last, “Tree Roots”.
It is all the more surprising that this period has never been given a special presentation, said Christophe Leribault, president of the Musee d’Orsay.
– Virtual Vincent –
One of the highlights is a room dedicated to his “double-square” panoramas, a technical revolution in which he used very long and thin canvases that prefigured the wide-screen landscapes of film.
So perhaps it’s fitting that the show ends with modern techniques that have become more common as exhibitions try to attract young audiences.
In addition to Van Gogh’s chatbot, visitors can also put on a virtual reality headset to enter Dr. Gachet’s kitchen, where Van Gogh spent his last weeks, take a surreal journey around a huge version of his paint palette, and dive into the tree roots of his last painting.
The state-of-the-art helmet from Taiwan’s Vive Arts can track users’ hands — without handheld controllers — allowing them to pick up objects in the virtual world and play with paintballs.
Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, shows some of the problems of the nascent technology.
When asked about his favorite color, AI Vincent is very sure (yellow).
But he struggles to recognize the people in his life and can’t find out Dr. Gachet’s name when asked by a French reporter.
“It recognizes French words, but we still need to fine-tune the AI so that it better understands proper nouns,” said Christophe Renaudineau, director of Jumbo Mana, the designer of the machine.
“This experiment allows us to improve the model,” he added.
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