Lifestyle
An AI Salvador Dalí will answer any question when called on his famous 'lobster phone'
Ask Dalí at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., allows visitors talk to the famous surrealist artist via an AI-generated version of his voice.
Martin Pagh Ludvigsen/Goodby Silverstein & Partners
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Martin Pagh Ludvigsen/Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Ask Dalí at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., allows visitors talk to the famous surrealist artist via an AI-generated version of his voice.
Martin Pagh Ludvigsen/Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Salvador Dalí was known for his surreal artworks featuring melting clocks and craggy desert backgrounds, his eccentric behaviors like driving a car packed to the roof with cauliflower, and his gravity-defying mustache.
He was also known for answering questions in cryptic ways. In 1966, when an interviewer with the CBC asked the artist if he thought he was crazy, Dalí’s response was: “Dalí is almost crazy. But the only difference between crazy people and Dalí is Dalí is not crazy.”
Now, visitors to the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., have the opportunity to ask any question they like of the famed surrealist artist who died in 1989.
Ask Dalí, a new installation based on a copy of Dalí’s iconic Lobster Telephone sculpture, allows visitors to pick up the crustacean-shaped receiver, ask a question, and hear Dalí’s response. The artist’s voice, speaking in heavily-accented English, is made possible through generative artificial intelligence.
The Dalí Museum
YouTube
“Why are the clocks melting?” is an example of one question someone asks in a promotional reel for the installation, which opened on April 11. “My dear questioner! Think not of the clocks as merely melting. Picture them as a vast dream.”
Bringing Dalí’s voice to life through AI
According to Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the San Francisco-based ad agency that collaborated on the installation with the Dalí Museum, the artist’s AI voice was trained on voice samples taken from archival interviews Dalí did in English over his career. (He spoke 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, this model includes extensive information about Dalí — an artist with a vast presence on the internet. The Dalí Museum also selected English translations of Dalí’s writings in other languages, including his Mystical Manifesto, Diary of a Genius and The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí.
“These have formed the basis of Dalí’s words and tone of voice through careful prompt engineering, refining and testing,” said Martin Pagh Ludvigsen, Goodby Silverstein & Partners’ director of creative technology & AI, in an email to NPR.
Visitors speak with AI Salvador Dalí via the “lobster phone” at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Martin Pagh Ludvigsen/Goodby Silverstein & Partners
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Martin Pagh Ludvigsen/Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Visitors speak with AI Salvador Dalí via the “lobster phone” at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Martin Pagh Ludvigsen/Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Ludvigsen said the AI Dalí has answered more than 3,000 questions so far. “People ask big questions about life, love and death from Dalí,” Ludvigsen said, adding he is able to monitor the AI’s answers, but not the visitors’ specific questions. The AI “frequently speaks of [Dalí’s] wife Gala when discussing love — ‘My marriage to Gala was an exquisite tapestry of love, beyond the binaries of mortal understanding,’ just popped up in the tool.”
Ludvigsen said the AI has also responded to questions about why humans kill animals: “A question soaked in existential dread yet trivial in the grand canvas of the cosmos. We kill animals perhaps because we are imprisoned in a labyrinth of primal instincts and modern desires, a surreal dance of survival and supremacy.”
On why there is so much darkness in the world: “Challenge the universe with deeper queries, like why do shadows celebrate the sun? Shadows celebrate the sun because they are the silent music of light’s absence. Each shadow is a dark fingerprint of the universe, revealing the hidden contours of time and space.”
Another frequent topic, according to Ludvigsen, is the Lobster Telephone itself. Dalí fashioned at least 10 of the objects in the 1930s. The work is constructed out of an old-fashioned rotary telephone and a plaster lobster. Some versions are all in white — the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg owns one of these — while others, like the one at The Tate in London, feature a black phone with a red lobster.
From Dalí to DALL-E
Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali (1904-1989) is pictured 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) is pictured in December 1964.
Terry Fincher/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
This is the latest in an string of tech-infused installations at the Dalí museum. Beginning in 2019, the AI installation Dalí Lives allowed visitors to interact with Dalí’s likeness on a series of screens throughout the museum. Since last year, the interactive installation Dream Tapestry has allowed visitors to create original digital paintings from a text description of a dream.
Dalí scholar Elliott King, an associate professor of art history at Washington and Lee University who was not involved with the museum’s exhibit, said he thought Dalí would have liked this AI-based interpretation of his voice and work, noting that the popular AI image generator DALL-E is in part inspired by the artist’s name. “He was so interested in scientific advancements,” King said. “I think that he would have been really tickled by people talking into this lobster phone.”
King said he thought the AI-generated voice worked well compared to the museum’s previous efforts. “It does sound much more like Dalí than anything that I’ve heard up until now,” King said. “His voice is so unusual. He had a very particular way of speaking where he would exaggerate certain words.”
But King said some of the AI answers did not sound authentic to Dalí’s creative language. King cited the “Why are the clocks melting?” question, and its response, “Picture them as a vast dream,” as an example. “That’s a little bit vague,” King said. “He’s never just going to say something nearly so mundane. It’s always going to be much more action-packed, much more exciting than just the regular thing that somebody might say.”
King said that in Dalí’s 1934 book The Conquest of the Irrational, Dalí describes the melting timepieces as “the soft, extravagant, solitary paranoiac-critical Camembert of time and space.” “To be fair, Dalí altered his interpretations of the soft clocks many times throughout his life,” King said. “In the 1950s, they were atomic; in the 1960s, they were prognosticators of DNA. But saying they are part of a ‘vast dream’ almost sounds too clear.”
King also said Dalí would never use the word “hi” when introducing himself, which is what the AI model does when the museum-goer picks up the lobster phone to speak to the AI surrealist. “That word sounds so odd coming out of his voice,” King said. “He always said, “Bonjour!” — always the French — even to say goodbye.”
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Even Janet Jackson, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg, and Lil Wayne‘s combined star power isn’t enough to outshine Mother Nature — who just forced Lovers & Friends Festival organizers to pull the plug … at the last minute!
The shocking announcement came late Friday night, less than 24 hours before the all-day, outdoor festival was supposed to begin at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds. Event organizers said they were expecting a windy day and prepared for it, but then the National Weather Service issued a High Wind Warning.
With the expectation of 30-35 mph sustained winds and wind gusts over 60 mph … they decided to cancel the highly-anticipated concert, calling it the “safest decision for our fans, artists and staff.”
The festival was going to feature all the aforementioned superstars plus Backstreet Boys, Fat Joe, Gwen Stefani, Nas, Ludacris, Nelly, Rick Ross, Robin Thicke, TLC, T-Pain, Timbaland and many more.
The 11th-hour cancelation means … not only are most of the artists already in Vegas, but thousands of fans — plus, many more who were already at airports on Friday night and Saturday morning about to board flights when the news came down.
The bad news for all involved is it’s gonna be a bitch — if not flat-out impossible — to reschedule, and keep all the same artists on the bill. For now, they’re not even talking about rescheduling, but all ticketholders are supposed to get a full refund within 30 days.
That’s their ticket price, but lots of fans will be screwed on their airfare and hotel costs.
Where is the love? Not in Sin City, friends!
The last photo Trisha Fountain took with her mother in May, 2006. Fountain’s mom died the week after her graduation. She said the poem “Epitaph” has helped offered her comfort.
Trisha Fountain
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Trisha Fountain
The last photo Trisha Fountain took with her mother in May, 2006. Fountain’s mom died the week after her graduation. She said the poem “Epitaph” has helped offered her comfort.
Trisha Fountain
Last month, we asked NPR readers what poetry means to them. We received nearly 500 responses, from lifelong poetry fans to those who have only recently come to enjoy the genre. From sparking the imagination to helping with mental health, listen to poems read by NPR readers and see how poetry has affected their lives.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Poetry to heal from grief
Trisha Fountain reads “Epitaph”
Dozens of readers shared stories of how poetry helped them process grief. Trisha Fountain of Ann Arbor, Mich., lost her mother to cancer the week after she graduated from college. “The months that followed were filled with feelings of confusion, anger, sadness, emptiness and lack of purpose,” she said.
Six months later, Fountain spent her first birthday without her mother at the funeral of her friend’s mother, who died of the same cancer. She heard Merrit Malloy’s “Epitaph” read at this funeral. Now 40 years old, Fountain still remembers the poem. “This poem allowed me to feel seen, held, directed and connected to my mom in a way that my grief didn’t allow me to process before that moment,” she said. “Throughout the last few decades, I have shared that poem with countless others during the loss of their loved ones as a way to ‘pay it forward’ and attempt to gift others with the same comfort and life affirmation it gave to me.
Melissa McNabb reads “One Art”
Many readers shared their love for “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. Melissa McNabb of Michigan said it was the first poem that made her gasp aloud when reading it. Aerie Treska of Baltimore, Md., said the poem took her breath away, “both because of the rawness of the speaker’s grief and the poem’s deceptively simple, yet elegantly complex structure, rhythm, and diction.” Treska calls it a “master class in the power of poetry to bear witness.”
Poetry for mental health
Evan De Back reads “The Things I Didn’t Do”
For many readers, poetry has been a transformative force in their lives as they battle various mental health struggles.
“Poetry has been an outlet for my emotions in stressful times, most often while I was depressed,” said Evan De Back of Johnston City, Tenn. The 39-year-old sometimes feels like he can’t express himself to others because his emotions are too raw. “[Writing poetry] helps me process and move past emotions that would otherwise mire me in rumination.” De Back reads a poem he wrote called “The Things I Didn’t Do.”
Poetry to inspire confidence
Some readers said they always have a poem they reach for when they need a reminder of everything they are capable of achieving. “In poems, we readers see our mirrored reflection and gain new insight into ourselves,” Lara Cowell of Honolulu, Hawaii, said. Cowell read Kimberly Blaeser’s “About Standing (in Kinship), because of how it “celebrates our collective strength and power when we work in synergy, harmony and friendship.”
Evan Wang reads “Muse for Night”
Evan Wang of King of Prussia, Pa., said poetry helped both him and his community blossom. Once a self-described “timid student,” Wang now performs his poetry as a Youth Poet Laureate. “Poetry found me — a first-generation American living in the quiet suburbs — in this vastness, took my hand, and helped me find myself. He shares his poem, “Muse for Night.”
Poetry to rouse the imagination
Hayley Kelsey of Florida calls poetry the highest literary art. “It comes closer to rendering the world around us than any other,” she said. “It has opened my eyes and ears to the wonders of the world again and again: sound, images, perception.”
Many other readers agreed that poetry sparks their imagination and stimulates their senses. Coel Whitemab of Honolulu, Hawaii, believes “poems are for everyone and everything” because everyone will interpret a poem differently. “Poetry sets me free…to imagine my life as a bird soaring on the breeze of imagination and thoughtfulness,” he said.
Nina Laubach reads “Absence, Presence”
Nina Laubach of Lawrenceville, N.J., shares her favorite poem, “Absence, Presence,” by Luisa A. Igloria. “I love how this poem moves through time, seasons, and generations and also returns us to our present, daily mundane lives,” she said. “It is…as if imagination was not some alternate, secondary path, but rather the very essence of expressing the experience, memory and longing to be human.”
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