VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)
Abstract
The 318th episode of BBC’s Doctor Who gave us a look at the museum of the future. Situated on board a space station, the Interstellar Song Contest Museum contains a host of familiar objects – costumes, posters and videos – but also features a chattable archive containing informational holograms of people associated with the contest. Of course, this is a fictional museum, but with the improved capabilities of AI-enabled voice ‘clones’ and ‘deepfake’ technologies, the use of AI to ‘revive’ the dead within cultural and heritage contexts is fast becoming a mundane proposition. Creating what we call ‘AI afterlives’ exposes deep ethical questions for GLAM institutions however: about consent, legacy, ownership and custodianship. In this paper we present findings from co-design work and reflective interviews about the creation of AI afterlives (with 36 and 18 GLAM participants respectively). Working with AI afterlives clearly crystalises many concerns that have been expressed more generally about how materials from the past are made use of in the present, but it also highlights a range of newer potential ruptures brought about by AI and automation: the ethics of working with ‘Big Tech’ to enliven digital/digitised cultural heritage assets; concerns about data entanglements reenforcing colonial logics, bias and marginalisation; and the need to (re)configure consent mechanisms and regulatory/ethical frameworks. Our collaborative research evidences a desire to resist AI in workflows where it is seen to undermine deeply held organisational and professionals values of care, sustainability and public stewardship.
Bethan Jones is a Research Associate on the Leverhulme Trust-funded Synthetic Pasts project at Cardiff University and an Honorary Research Fellow at Amgueddfa Cymru Museum Wales. She has written extensivel about fandom, gender and participatory cultures, and her work has been published in Television and New Media, Convergence and Transformative Works and Cultures, among others. She is on the board of the Fan Studies Network, co-chair of the SCMS Fan and Audience Studies SIG and co-editor of the journal Popular Communication.
Dr. Jenny Kidd is currently leading the Leverhulme Trust Synthetic Pasts project, which is situated at the nexus of (digital) memory studies and AI. She is a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (2024-2026) and a Research Fellow for the AHRC’s Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre as well as being on the Steering Committee for the Impact Community of the EU’s Europeana project. Her recent publications have explored; algorithmic systems and digital memory, crypto art and questions of value, social media communications, and varied uses of immersive media.
Dr. Eva Nieto McAvoy is a researcher of digital media and culture, with a focus on the theories and practices of new and interactive media in cultural and memory work at the intersection of knowledge, power, and technology. She studies digital transformations in media and cultural ecosystems, with a focus on the entanglements of creative work with technologies as situated, everyday practices across borders, particularly within contexts of unequal power relations. As well as being a lecturer in Digital media at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London she is currently working on the Leverhulme-funded project Synthetic Pasts.