The fusion of artificial intelligence (AI), big data and human cognitive systems has catalyzed a profound digital transformation of our lifestyles and production methods. This change is particularly noticeable in the field of art, where the integration of artificial intelligence has sparked innovative ideas and prompted new evaluations of traditional practices.
Museums often have large amounts of data. Artificial intelligence can be particularly useful for large collections, ensuring consistency and efficiency. Artificial intelligence can also help curators to identify patterns or similarities between works of art, artists and artistic movements that may be difficult for humans to detect. These details would include artist, title, date, cultural group, keywords, and description.
AI to reshape curatorial practices
The integration of artificial intelligence into the curation process will therefore reshape traditional curatorial practices, inviting us to reconsider the way in which exhibitions are planned and presented: it involves creating data sets, ensuring their quality, supervising them and training models of artificial intelligence for continuous improvement.
- However, the integration of machines and data in this process raises some questions: how do we define these abstract concepts in art?
It is essential that the data remains intact. When biased data is fed to the AI, there is a chance that biases will be strengthened or even worsened, leading to negative stereotypes. Experiences from some foreign museums highlight the complexities of using general AI tools in the curatorial process, for example problems with inappropriate artwork selections that were not in line with the intended theme and misleading titles. For example, Chat GPT was unable to access the museum’s publicly accessible artwork database because the museum’s database was not initially entered into ChatGPT. These obstacles highlight the shortcomings of artificial intelligence in art curation.
The importance of redefining the relationship between art and technology
Research shows that the integration of artificial intelligence into curatorial practices represents an approach to redefine the relationship between the individual and society. In this case, developments in artificial intelligence introduce us to AI curation beyond the lens of its technological limitations. These developments in artificial intelligence in curation represent an era of change and, looking to the future, we want to think that the new standard for future curatorial practices is for each museum to have its own artificial intelligence explicitly adapted to its own collections.
Are we therefore thinking of a new generation of AI curators?
The in-depth analysis of “AI Art Curation: Re-imagining the city of Helsinki on the occasion of its Biennial” is very interesting LINK to PDF
