I know it’s a crowded field, but I came across an AI / open data development recently that really made me stop and take a breath.
The Living Museum introduces itself as follows:
If the artifacts in museums could talk, what would you say to them? Would you ask about their origins, or what life was like back in their eras? Or would you simply listen to their stories?
Created by an independent developer, Jonathan Talmi, The Living Museum is an experimental AI interface that uses content from the BM’s open licensed digital collections database to enable users to curate personalised exhibits and “talk” to individual artefacts about their history and origins. The developer is unaffiliated with the British Museum and makes it clear that the data is used under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA licence.
In an introductory blog post Talmi says
I hope this project demonstrates that technology like AI can increase immersion, thereby improving educational outcomes, without sacrificing authenticity or factuality.
The app was launched on the Museums Computer Group mailing list and twitter a couple of weeks ago and it was met with a generally favourable response. However there were some dissenting voices, from curators, art historians, and authors, who pointed out the problematic nature of imposing AI generated voices onto artefacts of deep spiritual and cultural significance, whose presence in the BM’s collections is hugely contested.
Others questioned the macabre ethics of foisting an artificial voice on actual human remains, such as the museum’s collection of mummies. I had a surreal conversation with the mummy of Cleopatra, who died in Thebes aged 17, during the reign of Trajan. It was a deeply unsettling experience.
This is where “authenticity and factuality” were both sacrificed…
The response actually acknowledges the disrespectful and ethically questionable nature of the whole project. My head was starting to melt at this point.
Pressing the question of repatriation prompts the voice to “step out of the artificial artifact persona”…
The whole experience was as surreal as it was disturbing
There was also criticism from some quarters that the developer had “exploited” the work of professional curators by using the British Museum’s data set without their explicit knowledge or permission. It’s important to note that the CC BY-NC-SA licence does explicitly allow anyone to use the British Museum’s data within the terms of the licence, however just because the license says you can, doesn’t necessarily mean you should. When it comes to reusing open content, the licence is not the only thing that should be taken into consideration. This is one of the key points raised by the Ethics of Open Sharing working group commissioned by Creative Commons in 2021, and led by Josie Fraser. The report of the working group acknowledges that not everything should be shared openly, and highlights issues relating to cultural appropriation:
Ethical open sharing may require working in partnership with individuals, communities and groups and ensuring their voices are heard and approaches respected. While in some cases openly sharing resources can help to promote cultural heritage and redress gaps in knowledge, in others it may be experienced as cultural insensitivity, disrespect or appropriation — for example, in relation to sacred objects or stories and funerary remains.
Something that both the British Museum and developers using its digital collections should perhaps consider.
By coincidence, the launch of The Living Museum coincided with the release of Mati Diop‘s film Dahomey, winner of the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear award. Dahomey, also gives a voice to sacred cultural artefacts; a collection of looted treasures being repatriated from France to the former kingdom of Dahomey, in current day Benin. In Diop’s absorbing and hypnotic film the power figure of the Dahomeyan king Ghezo speaks in Fon, his voice disembodied and electronically modified.
In an interview with Radio 4’s Screenshoot (23:20), Diop spoke eloquently about “the violence of the absence of the artefacts from the African continent.”
“These artefacts are not objects, they have been objectified by the Western eye, by the colonial perspective, locked into different stages, art objects, ethnographic objects, even locked into beauty.”
“To me it was immediate to give back a voice to these artefacts because I felt that the film is what restitution is about, which is giving back a voice, which is giving back a narrative, a perspective. The film tries to embody the meaning of restitution.”
I was lucky enough to see Dahomey at the GFT accompanied by a conversation with Giovanna Vitelli, Head of Collections at The Hunterian, and Dr Christa Roodt and Andreas Giorgallis, University of Glasgow. The Hunterian is just one of a number of museums interrogating the harms perpetuated by their colonial legacy, through their Curating Discomfort intervention. The conversation touched on power, control and sacredness, with Vitelli noting
“Possession means power. We, the museums, hold the power, and control the power of language. The film speaks powerfully about voices we in the global north do not hear.”
I’ve written in the past about the importance of considering whose voices are included and excluded from open spaces and the creation and curation of open knowledge. On the surface it may appear that AI initiatives facilitated by the cultural commons, like The Living Museum, have the potential to bring collections to life and give a voice to marginalised subjects, however it’s important to question the authenticity of those voices. By imposing inauthentic AI generated voices on culturally sensitive artefacts there is a serious risk of perpetuating exploitative colonial legacies and racist ideology, rather than addressing harms and increasing knowledge equity. Something for us all to think about.
