Brian Sewell, who died in 2015 at the age of 84, was once described as “Britain’s most famous and controversial art critic”. He was not afraid to ruffle feathers and was often referred to by a long list of adjectives that were not always flattering. For many years he wrote for London’s Evening Standard, delivering scathing and trenchant commentary in a weekly column. Now, it seems safe to assume that he would have been a total nuisance if he were still alive, and the newspaper has “resurrected” his byline and will resume publishing articles in his name. Unfortunately, these articles are not written by real people, but by artificial intelligence programs.
The news comes from a report by Deadline, which cited two sources with knowledge of the paper’s plans. Deadline writes that “AI Sewell has been assigned to review the National Gallery’s new Vincent Van Gogh exhibition, titled Van Gogh: Poet and Lover,” and that the chatbot’s deployment is planned “at the highest levels of the National Gallery Discussions were held.” standard and consulted with Lord Lebedev, the newspaper’s owner.
Why publications do this is unclear, and most plausible explanations are poor. It also seems possible that The Standard is simply trying to stir up controversy and outrage to excite readers. The newspaper has been underperforming lately (recently switching from daily to weekly and firing a lot of real human writers), so some sort of publicity stunt makes sense.
The Criterion editors may have sincerely (albeit inexplicably) thought readers would be interested in a review of an art installation by a chatbot named after a late art critic. Maybe they thought people would find it cute. I really don’t know.
We also don’t know where Standard plans to get its AI version of Sewell — whether it will have an in-house team to build the virtual “writer” or whether it will partner with an AI company to get the job done. Gizmodo reached out to Standard for their details and will update our post when we hear back.
What’s clear is that, as things stand, artificial intelligence is terrible at creating art. The idea that it can allow readers to experience art and assess its quality is laughable.
In my mind, media companies making deals with artificial intelligence companies (and there have been quite a few of them lately) are roughly equivalent to college coeds handing over their home addresses to serial killers. After being thoroughly screwed over by the tech industry over the past two decades, which sucked up all the advertising revenue that previously powered news organizations, the solution is not to continue cozying up to the industry. It may be difficult to internalize given all the noise and hype surrounding this technology, but the bottom line is this: newspapers should be covering the AI industry, not working with it.
