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, trained on a large dataset of human discourse about art. Visitors speak directly with it. Asking questions, making claims, pushing back and receive responses that blend fact and fabrication in ways that are difficult to untangle.

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.

Shown at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark, June 2022 – June 2023.

Made possible with grants from The Danish Arts Foundation & Innovationsfonden