Article
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Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed
Exhibiting the Heritage of Covid-19—a Conversation with ChatGPT
Version 1
: Received: 20 July 2023 / Approved: 21 July 2023 / Online: 21 July 2023 (13:22:50 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Spennemann, D.H.R. Exhibiting the Heritage of COVID-19—A Conversation with ChatGPT. Heritage 2023, 6, 5732-5749. Spennemann, D.H.R. Exhibiting the Heritage of COVID-19—A Conversation with ChatGPT. Heritage 2023, 6, 5732-5749.
Abstract
The documentation and management of the cultural heritage of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the heritage digital age are emerging discourses in cultural heritage management. The enthusiastic uptake of a generative artificial intelligence application (ChatGPT) by the general public and academics alike has provided an opportunity to explore i) whether, and to what extent, generative AI can conceptualize an emergent, not well-described field of cultural heritage (the heritage of COVID-19, ii), whether it can design an exhibition on the topic and iii) whether it can identify sites associated with the pandemic that may be(come) significant heritage. Drawing on an extended ‘conversation’ with ChatGPT, this paper shows that generative AI is capable of not only developing a concept for an exhibition of the heritage of COVID-19 but also that it can provide a defensible array of exhibition topics as well as a relevant selection of exhibition objects. ChatGPT is also capable of making suggestions on the selection of cultural heritage sites associated with the pandemic, but these lack specificity. The discrepancy between ChatGPT’s responses to the exhibition concept and its responses regarding potential heritage sites suggests differential selection and access to data that were used to train the model, with a seemingly heavy reliance on Wikipedia. The ‘conversation’ has shown that ChatGPT can serve as a brainstorming tool, but that a curator’s considered interpretation of the responses is still essential.
Keywords
artificial intelligence; ChatGPT; COVID-19; cultural heritage; exhibition planning; heritage futures; museums
Subject
Arts and Humanities, Museology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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