Chat with Salvador Dalí Through a Lobster Phone at the Dalí Museum

Today, a month before the renowned surrealist’s 120th birthday, the Dalí Museum has unveiled the first edition of 'Ask Dalí.' An experience available only at The Dalí that allows visitors to ask any question of a re-created Salvador Dalí using the latest artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The debut follows a successful preview at the esteemed SXSW conference to a sold-out panel on the future of creativity. 

The experience was created by Goodby Silverstein & Partners (GS&P) and is powered by several modern machine-learning models, including GPT-4 from OpenAI and Eleven Multilingual V2 from ElevenLabs. The models have been trained using a variety of the artist’s writings and archival audio. The result is a voice that sounds remarkably like Dalí's real voice and a dialogue that reflects his unique personality, style and humour. 

To start a conversation, visitors to the Dalí Museum simply pick up a telephone inspired by Dalí’s famous 'Lobster Phone' and ask any question they would like. 

Hank Hine, director of the Dalí Museum, asked 'Ask Dalí,' what would a visitor to the Dalí Museum be sure to see? 'Ask Dalí' responded: “In the labyrinth of the imagination that unfurls within the Dalí Museum of St. Petersburg, one must seek the melting clocks in ‘The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory,’ where time drips like a dream refusing to be contained.”

This experience follows multiple collaborations between the Dalí Museum and GS&P. In 2019, as one of the first to experiment with AI in a museum, 'Dalí Lives' opened, enabling visitors to learn about Dalí’s life and work from a screen reimagining Dalí’s likeness. In 2023, The Dalí again worked with GS&P and OpenAI to create the award-winning “Dream Tapestry,” a first-of-its-kind experience where AI creates original digital paintings from a text description that Dalí Museum visitors provide of their dreams.

“Dalí was fascinated by the latest tools and technologies of his era and continually explored various artistic media,” said Jeff Goodby, co-founder and co-chairman of GS&P. “‘Ask Dalí’ provides a delightful new way to interact with machine-learning technology. Dalí’s poetic writings, in an imaginative style all his own, are the basis of the training, which provides dynamic and unpredictable answers to visitors’ questions.”