London Standard’s AI imitation of Brian Sewell proves art critics cannot be easily replaced
W ho 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.
