When Bob died in 1995, The Joy of Painting ended. Or so we thought.
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Critics called it a PR stunt. But for 12 minutes, the chat room fell silent again. People typed only one word: “Wow.” The last episode ended not with a landscape, but with the AI Bob cleaning his brushes. He turned to the camera. For the first time, he didn’t smile. When Bob died in 1995, The Joy of Painting ended
The event was billed as a two-hour “live-to-tape” simulation. Using 1,200 hours of original footage, the AI model—codenamed —was trained not just on Bob’s visual style, but on his cadence, his breathing patterns, his hesitations, and even his rare moments of silence. The result was a deepfake so seamless, so warm, that early test viewers reportedly wept—not because it was fake, but because it felt more Bob than Bob . Episode 1: “The Lonely Evergreen” Season 24, Episode 1 opened with the familiar shot: a blank canvas, a wooden palette, and the sound of a fan blowing in a quiet studio. The AI-generated Bob—rendered in 8K, with impossibly correct lighting—looked directly into the camera. His eyes crinkled. He smiled. Critics called it a PR stunt
After decades of archival training, voice synthesis breakthroughs, and generative video diffusion models, the Bob Ross estate—in partnership with a controversial AI studio named —announced something that polarized the world: Bob Ross AI: Season 24 .