A MUSEUM’S EXPERIENCE WITH AI

The “A Museum’s Experience with AI” article provides valuable insights into the practical application of commercial machine learning tools in a museum setting. It highlights the potential of these tools in expanding access to collections and enhancing user experience, particularly through automatic transcription and translation of audio and video materials. However, it also tells us about certain limitations of the current experiment with machine learning. The author emphasizes the current state of machine-generated metadata may not significantly surpass standard full-text search capabilities.. Also, the article draws attention to the limitations of commercial machine learning services, which are primarily tailored to the needs of businesses rather than cultural institutions. This suggests the need for customization and training of machine learning tools specifically for museum settings to address stringent quality requirements. Additionally, I agree that it’s important to decouple a museum’s database from specific machine learning services, as adopting a flexible architecture would allow museums to adapt better to changing tools and capabilities.

One thing that AI can do for visitors is to make museums more accessible for them. For instance, AI can automatically generate translation into different languages for foreigners, and also for people with disabilities, AI can even automatically generate sign language for the audio. While AI performs this task, it is important that visitors can clearly differentiate between human generated and machine generated metadata. In this way, users have the flexibility to choose between human and machine generated metadata based on their own preferences and needs.

Another important thing about applying AI in museums is that the AI system developed should be very flexible and ready for change. First, different museums might have varied specific needs, and the AI tools for museums should be easily customized to the given museum using that museum’s unique corpus of documents. Besides, AI models are updating at an incredibly fast speed, so the museum’s database should be decoupled from specific AI services. This would help create a flexible system where machine learning generated data can be easily imported, replaced, or updated in the museum’s database.