London Newspaper Plans To Revive Dead Art Critic With AI, Hires Real Writers

Brian Sewell, who died in 2015 aged 84, was once described as “Britain’s most famous and controversial art critic.” He was not afraid to offend people and was often called a long list of adjectives that were not always flattering. For years he wrote for London’s Evening Standard, publishing his witty commentary in a weekly column. Now, in a situation that—if he’s alive—it seems safe to assume he’d be absolutely disgusted, the newspaper has “revived” his byline and will resume publishing articles in his name. Unfortunately, instead of a real person writing these articles, they will be written by an artificial intelligence program.

The news comes from a report from Deadline, which cites two sources with knowledge of the newspaper’s plans. Deadline writes that “AI Sewell has been commissioned to curate the National Gallery’s new exhibition of Vincent van Gogh, entitled Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” and that plans for the chatbot’s deployment were “discussed at the highest level General and in consultation with Lord Lebedev, the owner of this newspaper.”

Why a particular book would do this is unknown and most plausible explanations are bad. It doesn’t seem out of the question that Zinga is just trying to stir up controversy and anger to further the interest of students. The newspaper hasn’t been doing very well lately (it just switched from a daily to a weekly version and has laid off a lot of real human writers), so advertising of some sort would make sense.

It’s possible that mainstream editors honestly (albeit vaguely) thought that readers would be interested in what a chatbot named after a dead art critic had to say about art installations. Maybe they think people will find it fun. I really don’t know.

We also don’t know where Standard plans to source Sewell’s AI version—whether it has an in-house team to build a virtual “author” or whether it will partner with an AI firm to do the work. Gizmodo has reached out to The Standard for details and will update our post when we hear back.

What is clear is that AI, as it stands today, does a poor job of creating art. The idea that it can find art and assess its quality to students is ridiculous.

In my opinion, media companies making deals with AI companies (and there have been quite a few recently) are about the same as college co-eds giving their home addresses to serial killers. After being bombarded by the tech industry over the past two decades (which has eaten up all the ad revenue that fueled journalistic institutions in the past), the solution is not to continue enjoying that industry. It may be hard to take in given all the noise and hype surrounding this technology, but the bottom line is this: newspapers should be reporting on the AI ​​industry, not collaborating with it.