Museum-AI Assemblages

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly become a mainstay of modern life.It has permeated many areas of our existence and is a significant driving force behind the sweeping digital transformation of society.Museums are no exception.On the contrary, they have proven particularly adept at adopting AI and used it to create conversational AI such as chatbots, robots, and interactive artworks; to observe and analyse visitor behaviour; to scan and automatically tag millions of images from digital archives, creating new forms of participation, learning, and aesthetic experience; to preserve material and intangible heritage; and to create new opportunities for heritage and museum-related research.Recent developments in the field of computer vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP), artificial neural networks (ANNs), and generative adversarial networks (GANs) are particularly central.In an exploratory assessment of AI projects in the museum and heritage sector in early 2021, we were able to compile a comprehensive list of 586 AI projects in 56 countries, more than 90 per cent of which were realized between 2016 and 2021. 1 These figures demonstrate the rapid spread of AI technologies in museums and the significant impact they will have on the field in the years to come.AI has the potential to transform curatorial practices and visitor experiences (including the way we learn and feel in the museum), the global circulation of data and images in digital museum archives, and the ways in which we recreate and preserve heritage for the future.The field of digital museum and heritage studies-by which I mean the totality of interdisciplinary studies that address the role of digital technologies in museums and heritage-has made great strides in recent years (for instance, Giaccardi 2012; Drotner/Dziekan/