Opinion Express View on AI-generated van Gogh: Zombie Vincent

In fantasy stories involving magic, gods, elves and dwarves — as well as most religious and other per-science worldviews — there is one surefire way to distinguish between good and evil, priests and sorcerers. The downfall of many a character begins with the quest for immortality (remember Voldemort) and ends with necromancy. The message is simple: Let the dead stay buried. But then, what chance do archetypes have against the desire to stay relevant in the age of AI? None at all, it seems, going by the latest Vincent van Gogh exhibit at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

“Bonjour Vincent” features a ghoulish, AI-generated van Gogh. Engineers have fed the software facts about the artist from early biographies, as well as training it on over 900 letters by him. A facsimile of the artist can now answer questions about his life, thoughts on his suicide and “mental health issues”. In his time, of course, things were both worse and more evocative – the inevitable darkness that gripped him was “melancholy”, Greek for the black bile, that consumes so many. But the problem with AI van Gogh isn’t just the lack of pathos, or even its limited knowledge. It is that necromancy, aided by technology, threatens a fundamental dialectic of life and art — between the finite and infinite, death and immortality.

Advertisement

Vincent van Gogh was a genius. Vincent van Gogh is dead. There was a time when only the former was debatable. Those who loved his work would read about him  and try to discover the creative genealogy, and how life affects art, of the paradigm he set. The artist lived on through his work, for posterity. Now, he may well be reduced to the same order of things as the chatbot people complain to when their midnight junk food delivery is running late.