On April 11th, a month before what would have been the artist’s 120th birthday, the Dalí Museum’s "Ask Dalí" opened to the public. The installation centers on a physical telephone inspired by Dalí’s famous "Lobster Telephone" sculpture. Picking it up connects museum visitors to an AI chatbot that’s powered by several machine learning models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI, and when visitors ask a question–much as they’d type in a prompt to ChatGPT–they’ll hear an answer spoken by the AI, but delivered in a clone of Dalí’s actual voice.

The museum installation was created by San Francisco ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GSP) and uses the museum’s source material from Dalí himself, including his writings,  to train the AIs, according to the agency’s director of creative tech and AI, Martin Pagh Ludvigsen, who described the exhibit in response to emailed questions. 

Two years ago, ITP alum Beth Harrison joined the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg to oversee their digital experience initiatives, many of which have been created by GSP. Last year, while working on the Dream Tapestry project, she discovered that Shan Jin, the person responsible for all of the interaction design & development was an ITP alum as well.

This month, Shan was back at the museum with the GSP team, developing their newest AI creation “Ask Dali”. Read more about their work here.