OLD AND BUSTED: Digital Thespians.
The New Hotness? Digital journalists! Zombie Journalism — British Newspaper Rumored to Be Bringing Back Dead Art Critic in AI Form.
One of the biggest debates raging on the artificial intelligence front — especially in the entertainment industry — is about the use of AI to keep people “alive” long after they’ve left this mortal coil. A once-proud London newspaper organization is rumored to be planning to put one of its most prominent, but deceased, writers back to work.
EXCLUSIVE: He was one of the most feared and revered British art critics of his generation — and now, nearly a decade after his death, Brian Sewell could be about to wield his pen once more.
Deadline understands that London’s historic Evening Standard newspaper has been making plans to revive its former writer using artificial intelligence.
Two sources said AI Sewell has been assigned to review The National Gallery’s new Vincent van Gogh exhibition, titled Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers.
There is something either insidious or hilarious about having art critiqued by soulless artificial intelligence. Then again, many (most?) artists and entertainers would say that living, breathing critics don’t have souls either.
I’d be curious to see how an AI journobot programmed with the leitmotifs of a critic who passed on a decade ago would respond to today’s ever-so-woke art world.
In the world of film criticism, Bosley Crowther was The Man at the New York Times for decades, until he was put out to pasture because he hated 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde with a white-hot passion, and was suddenly seen by the paper’s core leftist audience as an ancient reactionary. Speaking of the latter, note this from further into the Deadline article that Stephen Kruiser quoted above:
Sewell, who died in 2015 at the age of 84, worked for the Standard for more than 30 years and was renowned for his biting critiques.
Known as Britain’s poshest art critic, he described a Damien Hirst exhibition as “detestable” and said Banksy should have been “put down at birth.” He once said there has “never been a first-rank woman artist” and “only men are capable of aesthetic greatness.”
C’mon Evening Standard, make this happen – and then program an AI letters to the editor reader; both will have plenty of fun dealing with exploding British crania!