Digital platform that uses artificial intelligence launched in British museum

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a tool that has increasingly entered the field of human activity. There are now examples of its use in the museum field with The Living Museum application, launched in October.

To date, some of its most effective uses developed are in commerce, natural language processing, industrial techniques, facial recognition, medicine, web search engines, personal digital assistants, machine translations and image generation.

The dissemination of archaeological and historical knowledge is one of the objectives of The Living Museum (https://www.livingmuseum.app/), developed by AI expert and independent engineer Jonathan Talmi.

The innovation of this development is that, using elements from the British Museum collection, the natural language model allows chat even with pieces from dozens of cultures collected in the English venue.

Through the application you can converse with some of the most important objects in the museum, such as the famous Rosetta stone, which became the key to the translation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs; with a multitude of Assyrian reliefs; sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens, whose restitution demand is permanent; a moai from Easter Island and the colossal sculpture of the head of Amenhotep III.

The chat informs that you can communicate fluently and historically accurate in English, Spanish, French, German and, with more limited ability, Italian and Catalan.

The online project has as its universe around one million 200 thousand objects from the British collection but without being associated with the London site.

Talmi stated on The Living Museum website (https://www.livingmuseum.app/) that this platform has the mission of showing the way in which these technologies can influence creating attractive experiences for museum visitors and users. domestic.

He added: First, we allow visitors to create personalized exhibits by searching the collection using natural language. Second, we use large language models (LLM) to bring the artifacts to life, allowing the audience to feel their presence and learn about the history through dialogue..

You can do, Talmi continued, “a natural language search, such as searching for concrete objects (for example, ‘clothes from China’), general topics (such as ‘life in the time of the pharaohs’), or abstract concepts (for example, ‘ cats’ or ‘yellow’), which will create exhibitions that intertwine artifacts from different cultures and eras.

If you want to know more about an object, click to enlarge it and start a conversation. Ask the artifact for its origins, meaning, and historical context, or anything else you can think ofwrote the developer.

The archaeologist Ómar Espinosa (Mexico City, 1989) told The Day that there is an interest in accessing knowledge, which has given rise to projects in which investments are time, effort and money to open a page where you can access information in a much more interactive and interesting way about archaeological artifacts. A third interesting line of analysis is that these types of initiatives sometimes cover what is not done within the institutions..

He added that the communication model of museums on many occasions continues to be very rigid, far from generate a much closer dialogue with those who are not involved in that type of work, that is, social sciences or humanities.

Fluid and well structured

The disseminator said that by using The Living Museum around Mexican, Egyptian and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) archaeological heritage, I found it to be a fluid, well-structured platform. It doesn’t have so many programming errors, that is, it works very well and has an adequate interaction system. It is very easy to understand.

In your charla On the website, Espinosa said, “I did not notice that there were strange or invented things or anything that did not coincide with the cultural history that I know or that I have references to. I asked him the source of the information, he told me ‘I am telling you from what has been documented with the investigations of archaeologists so and so’, although talking to an archaeological piece is a fantasy.”

He highlighted that the application works under a Creative Commons license, and it is explained that the information and images correspond to the British Museum although it is not associated with it, and the page is not for profit. That is, it is being created for consultation purposes so that people know the background of the pieces using these new technologies, such as artificial intelligence..

The specialist in recording topics such as archaeological heritage and its illegal trafficking in the virtual environment commented that one of the topics he was interested in knowing was the platform’s position on the restitution of artifacts. To do this, he asked questions about pieces from the Mexican context and from the Egyptian and Rapa Nui cultures, about which the United Kingdom museum has been criticized.

He said that in all these cases he generated the same text in which he explained that it is the history of the piece until it arrived at the museum and that if it were not for these sites, many of them could not be preserved. “It is the position of any museum that has been criticized for colonialism, for example the British, the Louvre or the one in Berlin.

“He spoke about the accumulation of archaeological pieces or elements of the cultural heritage of other countries in the sense that if they are not kept in these museums or in private collections they would disappear and that this justifies his actions. Almost like emotional blackmail and a superiority complex to ‘save’ the archaeological pieces. It pretends to be very neutral but in reality it is not.”

Espinosa said that in the past three years, many very good proposals have emerged on platforms, web pages or dissemination projects on social networks, which show interest in archaeological knowledge. It is important that they are arising and are present.

He concluded: Artificial intelligence has coexisted little with museums or archeology in general and here we have an example. There are things that perhaps can be adjusted or included in much larger conversations, but this platform is quite interesting.