Van the “man”

Visitors to the Musée D’Orsay in Paris can take in some of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings. And now they can chat to the artist, too. “Bounjour Vincent”, a new exhibition, allows visitors to interact with an artificial intelligence Van Gogh. The AI is trained on 900 letters written by the artist. Software engineers worked with historians to make the AI as accurate as possible, including the addition of deliberate grammatical mistakes to Van Gogh’s answers (French was his second language). Perhaps unsurprisingly, a popular question for the artist is why he cut his left ear off. AI Van Gogh clarifies he only removed part of his ear lobe, and says of his subsequent suicide: “This is still a subject of speculation among historians and specialists. The truth of my motivation remains a mystery even to me.” (It certainly remains a mystery; a 2020 paper in the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology even suggested he was murdered.) Agnès Abastado, the museum’s head of digital development, hopes that AI technology can bring new interest to 19th century art.