Making AI More Culturally Aware: Promises, Pitfalls and Practical Examples from the Cultural AI Lab

AI and largescale digitisation of GLAM resources seems like a perfect match, but AI methods are typically not geared towards the cultural sensitivities contained in these resources. Nor can they always deal adequately with historical language or the bias contained in them. It is therefore necessary that AI researchers and GLAM professionals work together closely to assess where and how AI can augment collections responsibly. In this talk, I will present practical examples from the Dutch Cultural AI Lab, a collaboration between 4 cultural heritage institutions and 4 research instutions that in 2019 created a shared research agenda to study, design and develop socio-technological AI systems that are implicitly or explicitly aware of the subtle and subjective complexity of human culture.