Using an AI-powered smartphone app to appreciate fine art feels counterintuitive, but stick with us for a minute.

Fewer people are attending arts events — like museums, plays, and movies — in person since the pandemic. And in some cases, attendance was never that high: Pre-pandemic, just 25% to 31% of US adults reported visiting a museum within the year.

You know what is high, though? The rate of Americans who say they use the internet (95%) and have a smartphone (90%).

So if we want to get people involved in the arts again — does it need to reach them on their phone?

According to a growing group of startups, the answer is yes:

• Rebind Publishing, which launched this week, is an AI-powered reading platform that lets users interact with chatbots that have been trained on expert analysis.
• Jumbo Mana created an AI-powered Vincent van Gogh to answer visitors’ questions at an exhibit of his work in France’s Musee D’Orsay.
• Hello History is an AI chatbot app that lets users interact with historical figures.

You can even make your own history with Orson’s StoryShop.ai, which gathers a user’s stories through automated interviews and edits those clips into a documentary.

Tech on display

To capture the attention of visitors, museums have been embracing tech for everything from immersive art installations to augmented reality apps that explain the history behind the art.

Plus, tech can be used to help art historians preserve and analyze artifacts:

• Two-thousand-year-old Herculaneum scrolls that survived the Mount Vesuvius eruption were able to be read last year using X-ray and AI technology.
• Missing parts of a trimmed Rembrandt painting were seen for the first time in 300 years with AI-generated restoration.
• The Google Arts & Culture lab used machine learning to reconstruct the colors likely used in a Gustav Klimt painting.

And today’s tech can help historians to analyze and authenticate artworks more easily and accurately.

Now, time to go ask Van Gogh about that whole ear thing.

Take that, machines: A real photo was disqualified from an AI photo contest. Photographer Miles Astray’s submission — a photo of a flamingo on a beach, which took third place in the 1839 Color Photography Awards’ AI category and even won the People’s Vote Award — was ultimately disqualified from the competition for not being AI-generated. But after several instances of AI beating humans at their own games, it was still a win for Astray, who only meant to send a message: “There is nothing more fantastic and creative than Mother Nature herself.”

What are Gen Zers up to now? Guiding their investments with tarot readings, apparently. Day trading has always been an uphill climb — previous studies have projected 80%+ of solo investors lose money — but that’s because all those idiots didn’t have art of divination on their side. There’s a rising trend of young TikTokers pulling tarot cards to seek stock-trading guidance trades and, amazingly, it’s (allegedly) working for some of them? One influencer who mixes “energetic influences” with Robinhood says she received a $6k/month gift from the universe.

But wait! We've got even more people making money divining the future. Officials in Norfolk, Virginia, nixed its 45-year-old ban on psychic services, clearing the way for soothsayers to legally conduct business in the city. Previously, palm reading, phrenology, and other means of clairvoyance constituted a first-degree misdemeanor and could lead to one year in jail. Lifting the ordinance may lead to a solid boost for Norfolk’s local economy — the US psychic services industry tallied an estimated $2.3B in revenue last year. Unlike America’s 97k practitioners, we never saw that kind of economic impact coming.