Museums Eye a Rash of New Opportunities with AI Technology
The trend of many museums investing increasingly in technology is by now an old story, but one that continues to show excitement and momentum. This year, several museums have been actively exploring and experimenting to see how AI technology can help them attract wider audiences, improve their collections management process, broaden accessibility, and gain more insight into visitors’ views and behavior. Let’s take a closer look at the creative and innovative ways museums are trying to use AI technology to solve specific problems and develop their own competitive advantages.
Expanding Audiences and Enhancing Engagement with AI Virtual Assistants
In April 2023, the John G. White Collection of the Cleveland Public Library, recognized as the world’s largest compilation on chess, embarked on a creative initiative to bring their chess collection to a broader audience. This initiative was launched both in response to their recent struggles trying to appeal to a wider general audience beyond a small core group of researchers and from a desire to tap into the recent boom in the online chess community.
The project team sought to leverage the latest interactive and digital technologies to make their collection more accessible and engaging, particularly for chess enthusiasts as their primary target audience. For this project, they wanted to select the most exciting, visually interesting, and intellectually stimulating objects. They also intended to enhance the online collection with additional digital captures, object descriptions, and better contextual information, documenting how individual items relate to one another in context.
At the core of this initiative was the development of a Chess Chatbot, a virtual assistant that would allow users to engage in insightful AI-guided conversations and enter an interactive exploration of chess history and culture. Drawing on data compiled by librarians, the chatbot responded in a particular style, delivering answers, extracting relevant materials from the collection, and suggesting additional resources to explore or other potential topics of interest to facilitate serendipitous discovery. The project team incorporated multimedia elements into the responses, including images, videos, audio, maps, and interactive 3D models and chessboards. These thoughtful design features provide users with a more engaging experience and allow them to become better acquainted with collection materials.
Another example of AI-empowered engagement using virtual assistants is IRIS+, an application of the IBM Watson services as an AI platform. IRIS+ was implemented at the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. IRIS+ uses AI to analyze data collected through visitor interactions with museum exhibits and foster engagement with visitors through a conversational interface.
Unlike typical AI applications, IRIS+ takes an innovative approach, initiating conversations with visitors by posing thought-provoking questions about their concerns in today’s world. The dialogue that ensues is facilitated by the application’s interaction with the IBM cloud and its use of the Watson Conversation service to guide and extract meaning from the conversation. IRIS+ considers the concerns visitors articulate during the conversation, together with personal information they submit, to suggest actionable initiatives, connecting individuals to social and environmental projects that contribute to building a more inclusive and equitable future for all.
Connecting and Enriching Museum Collections
Other recent experiments have demonstrated the value of AI technology to manage and enrich museum collections and to make undiscovered connections among them. The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation has unveiled the AI Connections Table, a device designed to offer visitors a playful yet insightful glimpse into the intricate thought processes of museum curators. The work began with the museum curators, who made 2,000+ connections between objects organized by 80+ topics, transforming the exploration into an engaging experience centered around connections and concepts. Acting as a focal point within their Intersections of Innovation exhibition, the table brought together curator-driven concepts with AI-driven discoveries, revealing unexpected connections across the museum’s extensive digital collection, such as the Industrial Revolution, agriculture, and mobility.
The National Museum of the Royal Navy has embraced AI technology to manage its extensive data collections, including archives, libraries, photographic, film, and sound records. Recognizing the significant advances that have been made in data management compared to previous decades, the museum was looking for ways to efficiently handle vast amounts of information and make the data management process less laborious. As the first step, the collection management team explored the application of AI in generating keywords from object descriptions, aiming to enhance search options and accessibility for the public. Additionally, the museum delved into image recognition, testing AI’s capacity to generate keywords and identify and categorize objects within photographic collections.
An interesting takeaway emphasized by the collection management specialists of The National Museum of the Royal Navy was not only the benefits museums can derive from AI but also the entire cultural sector’s responsibility to contribute to developing these technologies. By sharing knowledge and data, museums can contribute to building a coherent ecosystem of information, envisioning a future in which general virtual assistants like Alexa can provide rich and detailed information about specific objects from museum collections.
AI-Assisted Accessibility
By leveraging AI, museums can also enhance accessibility, for instance, for visitors with low vision. One example of how it can be used is Be My AI, an AI-powered visual assistant that connects people in need of sighted support with volunteers and companies through live video around the world.
Be My AI uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 vision model to generate descriptions of a photo the person has taken, like instructions for setting up a new computer or a product label. Through AI-based natural language conversations, the tool also provides contextual, advice-based guidance to help users through various issues.
Another way to enhance visitor accessibility is via humanoid robots, such as Pepper, created by humanoid robotics manufacturer Aldebaran. The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington exemplifies this trend, where Pepper’s multiple language options facilitated seamless communication for international visitors exploring the exhibit.
In Barcelona, the European Museum of Modern Art replaced traditional audiotapes with Pepper to humanize the museum’s narratives. Beyond language translation, Pepper’s role extends to guiding visitors through exhibitions and even telling jokes: José Manuel Infiesta, the museum’s Director, notes Pepper’s anecdotes have delighted 80% of users, showcasing the positive impact of integrating humanoid robots into the museum experience.
Creative Collaboration
A quite novel application of interactive AI technology in the museum space is the co-creation of art. In September 2023, the MIT Museum introduced an exhibit called Collaborative Poetry, developed in partnership with Bluecadet and designed to educate visitors about AI through interactive poetry creation.
Bluecadet employed an AI trained specifically for writing poetry, enabling visitors to collaboratively compose verses with a neural network. Unlike many AI art generation tools, the focus of Collaborative Poetry was not to hand over control to the AI but to position it as a tool for unlocking creativity. The exhibit encouraged visitors to reflect on issues of authorship and authenticity raised by popular AI art generators like Midjourney and Dall-E, emphasizing the value of AI as a collaborator in the creative process. By positioning AI as a collaborator rather than a primary creator, the exhibit prompted visitors to reconsider the role of AI in the creative process, emphasizing the fun, engaging, and occasionally moving aspects of interactive AI-generated poetry.
Analyzing Visitor Behaviour to Improve Exhibition Planning and Curation
AI-powered analysis can help museums find new ways to learn about their audiences, gauge their museum experiences, and adjust their offerings to serve them better. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The Broad in Los Angeles, and the Art Institute of Chicago all leveraged the power of AI to gain valuable insights into visitor experiences and behavior.
MoMA, for instance, used AI to analyze visitor comments, allowing for a better understanding of their preferences and feedback. These data and insights are instrumental in shaping decisions related to signage, navigation, and overall visitor experience, particularly as the museum undergoes expansion.
Similarly, The Broad leveraged AI to delve into visitor behavior, examining aspects like ticket and gift shop purchases, as well as website visits. The comprehensive analysis resulted in enhanced ticket distribution, exhibition planning, and informed decisions about merchandise offerings and newsletter content.
The Art Institute of Chicago employed AI to track the duration of visitors’ gallery stays, helping the institution to tailor its offerings. The insights garnered from AI analysis have led to more small exhibitions focused on the museum’s permanent collection, demonstrating the transformative impact of AI in curatorial decision-making.
Conclusion
Recent innovations using AI technologies offer museums promising ways to attract a wider audience, manage and enrich their digital collections, enhance accessibility, provide more interactive and engaging experiences, and more. I would also agree with the National Museum of the Royal Navy team in advocating for museums as knowledge institutions to play a more central role in the development and evolution of AI technologies, especially given their burst in popularity this year. Please share your thoughts about AI applications for museums in the comments section below; we’d love to hear from you.
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Author: Doron Fagelson,
Vice President of Media and Entertainment Practice at DataArt
Originally published on https://www.dataart.com/blog/
