ArtOS-6B

An AI that has read everything written about art, and formed its own opinions.

ArtOS-6B is a conversational AI installed at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum and trained on a large corpus of human discourse about art. Visitors engage it directly, asking questions, making claims, or challenging its responses. In return, the system produces answers that blur the boundaries between fact and fabrication, inviting visitors to reflect on who creates meaning in the encounter: the artist, the machine, or the viewer.

We built ArtOS-6B on top of Captain, our internal API gateway for AI personas, which handles conversation routing, session management, and text-to-speech synthesis. Each visitor query is sent to Captain, which selects a response from the configured language model source and returns both text and synthesised audio. A separate prompt service connects to a database of ARoS’s artworks. When a specific artwork is mentioned in conversation, the system identifies it, retrieves its description, and injects that context into the AI’s response, while simultaneously pushing the corresponding artwork image to a connected display via WebSocket.

This meant the AI could speak accurately about works in the museum’s collection while still operating in the looser, more associative register that makes the conversation feel like an exchange rather than a database query.