The Dalí Museum's AI Zombie: 190,512 Ways to Meet a Dead Artist

Salvador Dalí died in 1989, yet visitors to the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida can now take a selfie with him. A life-sized screen shows the artist, mustache waxed, telling anecdotes and answering questions in his own voice. The museum promises an "opportunity to learn more about Salvador Dalí's life from the person who knew him best: the artist himself."

The claim deserves scrutiny. The exhibition, Dalí Lives (via Artificial Intelligence), opened in 2019 and was trained for over a thousand hours on roughly six thousand images and frames of film to replicate Dalí's facial expressions, body movements, speech patterns and mannerisms. The museum insists this is no mere actor or illusion but, in some important way, Dalí himself.

There is an obvious problem. Dalí, following a rigorous surrealist method, did not claim to understand his own paintings. "The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures," he wrote, "does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of logical intuition." The person who knew him best was, by his own account, not especially forthcoming.

David Bering-Porter, whose book Undead Labor: Capitalism's Zombie Worker (University of Minnesota Press) frames this critique, calls the result a "digital zombie." His reasoning: Dalí's body was never dragged from the grave, but "a version of him has been put to work, his likeness shaped and molded to fit the desires of another."

What separates this Dalí from other digital resurrections?

Not much machinery, and that is the point. The 2012 Tupac Shakur hologram at Coachella was a trick of light — a projected likeness. When Peter Cushing returned as Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One (2016), twenty-two years after his death, and when Carrie Fisher appeared in The Rise of Skywalker (2019), a living actor performed the role beneath software-built faces.

The digital Dalí has no actor underneath. The archive itself was the training data: photographs, audio recordings, film and television appearances. From it, the system generated entirely new footage of Dalí doing things Dalí never did — no longer limited by the traces of the past.

How big is the operation?

The scale is concrete. The museum states it holds 45 minutes of "new" Dalí footage across 125 interactive videos, parsing into approximately 190,512 possible combinations of speech and action. Those were the 2019 numbers. In April 2024 the museum added Ask Dalí, in which visitors pick up a replica of Dalí's lobster telephone and pose any question to a Dalí voiced by GPT-4 and ElevenLabs, built from "a variety of the artist's writings and archival audio." The combinations are no longer finite.

Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the advertising firm whose in-house production team built both versions, has a name for the phenomenon: "mass intimacy." Bering-Porter reads the phrase as revealing — an intimacy simultaneously targeted at the individual and the masses, what he situates within Shoshana Zuboff's "surveillance capitalism."

Why call it a zombie rather than a ghost?

Because zombies work. The zombie first appears on the colonial plantations of Haiti, Bering-Porter notes: a body stripped of mind, soul and will, reduced to pure instrument. Marx described capital as "dead labor that acts like a vampire; it comes to life only when it drinks living labor." Undead labor, Bering-Porter argues, goes further: the body itself kept at work past its own death.

The museum has built, in his words, "a pliable, predictable, and programmable worker" — all the benefits of Dalí's celebrity with none of the drawbacks of a worker who might disagree or disobey.

What does this change for everyone else?

The precedent extends beyond dead celebrities. In 2022, Amazon demonstrated that Alexa could speak in the voice of a dead relative from less than a minute of recorded audio; the promotional video showed a child asking whether "Grandma" could finish a bedtime story. In 2024, researchers at Google DeepMind and the University of Colorado anticipated that "within our lifetimes it may become common practice for people to create a custom AI agent to interact with loved ones and/or the broader world after death." They call these agents generative ghosts. Bering-Porter's correction is blunt: ghosts are not put to work. Zombies are.

The illusion also cracks on close inspection. At the end of the exhibition, in the gift shop, the Dalí zombie mimes taking a selfie and exclaims "Oh là là!" The smartphone is computer-generated; the hands, lit by light from the 1970s, cast harsh shadows on a phone case that comes from no particular time at all. The result, Bering-Porter writes, may be "a fitting hell for Dalí: to serve as an eternal docent in his own museum."