AI Resurrection of Art Critic Brian Sewell Sparks Controversy and Debate

London Standard's AI imitation of Brian Sewell proves art critics cannot be easily replaced

Nonsensical writing lacks Sewell's authentic voice and is hateful way for paper to remember one of its best writers Who knew the late art critic Brian Sewell was such a tediously cliched writer? Especially since some of the dead verbiage in the London Standard's AI version of Sewell reviewing Van Gogh at the National Gallery has become common currency only since his death at 84 in 2015. Give him credit, he had a voice. And it was a posh voice. Evidently the chatbot used by the Standard needs to be fed a lot more novels by Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, some Latin perhaps, and a mouthful of plums before it can begin to resemble the public school-educated, Courtauld-trained Sewell who started his career as the protege of the upper class art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt. I stopped watching The Crown when Sam West as Blunt, the traitorous Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, talked about "early modern art". No way would this snooty connoisseur have used that social historian's terminology. The Standard's latest work is even more nonsensical. The neutral classless tones of AI don't have the waspishness and hauteur of Sewell at all. Or as he might have put it: plainly the day a machine mimics the idiosyncracies of a human author remains as distant and unlikely as that far off utopia in which a woman paints an undying masterpiece. One reason the Standard piece is a failed copy of Sewell is that it isn't offensive enough. For the tiny, tiny minority of human beings who make a living as professional art critics, this exercise is very heartening. It turns out it is not so easy to replace us with AI. Plenty of free trips and private viewings of blockbusters ahead. Break out the foie gras. It was on a press trip to Paris that I first met Sewell. The day started with fans sweetly hailing him at the station. He kindly said he'd been wanting to meet me before adding that he pictured me as someone better looking. By the end of the trip he had managed to opine that Evelyn Waugh was a rubbish novelist, seemingly oblivious that the writer's daughter was among us. Priceless. Sewell was funny, uncensored, a bit ridiculous, human - all too human - and there's not a trace of that in the Standard's poor imitation. Sewell himself let his hinterland be shown only late in life when he finally wrote about his sexual adventures as a gay man. But it's not just the prose that's blank and inert. There's no sense of a living eye looking at stuff. Art criticism is about recording as honestly as you can your direct observations of art: Sewell always valued that honesty very highly. This pseudo-Sewell - available only in print, currently - just cobbles together abstract opinions, culled from from various sources doubtless including old Sewell articles, with no sense of anyone actually looking at art. You could write this without even seeing the Van Gogh exhibition. Which is what has happened, of course. In the end it is a surprisingly hateful way for the Standard to remember one of the London Evening Standard's most famous writers. It caricatures Sewell as a thug who unthinkingly trashed everything, including, it assumes, this great Van Gogh show. He might have done, but surely for more coherent reasons. He certainly wouldn't have misunderstood the curators as blatantly as the AI version of him does: far from glorying in Van Gogh's romanticism they actually take a debatable line that his tragic life has been mythified. You can understand (human) writing only in its time. Sewell didn't just attack everything with this machine's moronic malignity. He became famous in the 1990s because he was the only British critic who consistently, entertainingly, denounced the Young British Artist generation. He outraged the art world at the time, but today the YBAs are considered best forgotten by the art world itself. So did he maybe have a point? It would have been more pointed to have AI Sewell review this year's Turner Prize. Perhaps he would see in Claudette Johnson a genuinely fine draughtsman and hail her as reviving the figure, "even though female". Who knows - people are never just zeros and ones.

London Standard to feature AI-written review 'by late art critic Brian Sewell'

'Experimental review' to feature in relaunched newspaper 'to provoke discussion' about AI and journalism The late British art critic Brian Sewell is making a return to journalism via artificial intelligence, according to the newspaper that established his reputation as a distinctive cultural voice. The London Evening Standard, rebranded as the London Standard, will feature a one-off AI-written review by the renowned critic, who died in 2015 at the age of 84, when it is published on Thursday. The Standard's interim chief executive, Paul Kanareck, said the edition will have multiple features on AI and London's role as a hub for the technology. "The London Standard is a bold and disruptive new publication," he said. "It includes an experimental AI review by our legendary critic Brian Sewell, and his estate are delighted." Sewell joined joined the Standard in 1984 and won multiple awards for his work. The Standard did not confirm how it will recreate Sewell's distinctive style - he once wrote that Banksy "should have been put down at birth" - but chatbots can be prompted to produce work in the style of different writers. When prompted by the Guardian on Wednesday, the ChatGPT chatbot produced a faux-article on Vincent Van Gogh written in a rough approximation of Sewell's style. The Standard has moved to a weekly publication cycle. In June it was reported the title is cutting about 70 editorial roles from its staff of 120 journalists. Reflecting on Sewell's work after his death in 2015, the Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones wrote: "His views were pungent and got people arguing and that's what matters." News website Deadline, which first reported the Sewell plan, claimed the piece would be a review of the new Van Gogh exhibition at London's National Gallery, which the Guardian gave five stars. Karaneck told the Press Gazette website the review was a "one-off intended to provoke discussion about AI and journalism". The potential role of AI in news has become one of many hot topics around the emergence of powerful tools such as ChatGPT, which have impressed with their writing ability - and thus their potential to replace work normally carried out by humans - but are also prone to factual errors known as "hallucinations". Recreating dead people via AI can carry legal and moral risk, although Karaneck stressed the Sewell piece had the approval of the late critic's estate. In May the family of Michael Schumacher won a legal case against the publisher of a German magazine that printed an AI-generated interview with the Formula One champion, who suffered a near-fatal brain injury in 2013. The editor of the magazine was fired ahead of the legal hearing. A number of commercial AI products have also emerged that impersonate deceased people in chatbot or audio form, but have been criticised for encouraging an "unwillingness to mourn".

London Newspaper Plans to Revive Dead Art Critic With AI, Lays Off Real Writers

One of London's biggest newspapers is resurrecting a famous editorial personality via algorithm. Brian Sewell, who died in 2015 at the age of 84, was once described as "Britain's most famous and controversial art critic." He wasn't afraid to piss people off and was frequently referred to by a long list of adjectives that weren't always flattering. For years he wrote for the London's Evening Standard, publishing his incisive and cutting commentary in a weekly column. Now, in a development thatâ€"were he aliveâ€"it seems safe to assume he would completely and utterly hate, the newspaper has "resurrected" his byline and will resume publishing articles in his name. Unfortunately, instead of having a real human write the articles, they will be penned by an artificial intelligence program. This news comes via a report from Deadline, which quotes two sources with knowledge of the newspaper's plans. Deadline writes that "AI Sewell has been assigned to review The National Gallery’s new Vincent van Gogh exhibition, titled Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers" and that the plans for the chatbot's deployment "were discussed at the highest level of the Standard and in consultation with Lord Lebedev, the newspaper’s proprietor." Why a publication would do this is unknown and most of the plausible explanations are bad. It doesn't seem out of the realm of the possibility that the Standard is merely trying to stir up controversy and outrage to drive reader interest. The newspaper hasn't been doing very well lately (it recently switched from daily to weekly editions and has been laying off a lot of real human writers), so a publicity stunt of some kind would make sense. It's possible Standard editors earnestly (albeit inexplicably) think that readers will be interested in what a chatbot named after a dead art critic has to say about art installations. Maybe they think people will find it cute. I really have no idea. We also don't know where the Standard plans to get its AI version of Sewellâ€"whether it has an in-house team that will build the virtual "writer" or will partner with an AI firm to get the job done. Gizmodo reached out to the Standard to ask them for details and will update our post when we receive a response. What is clear is that AI, as it stands today, does a piss-poor job of making art. The notion that it could experience art and evaluate its quality for readers is laughable. In my view, media companies who makes deals with AI companies (and there have been quite a few lately) are roughly equivalent to college co-eds who hand out their home addresses to serial killers. After getting royally screwed by the tech industry for the last two decades (which has sucked up all of the ad revenue that previously fueled journalistic institutions), the solution isn't to then go and continue cozying up to that 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 reporting on the AI industry, not partnering with it.