The Dance of the Doppelgängers: AI and the cultural heritage community
Susan Hazan · Electronic workshops in computing · 2023
There are severe issues that bring the impact of AI enabled systems into sharp focus for the cultural heritage sector, especially when these platforms are open, extremely tempting, and now accessible for everyone who may wish to create art or write a novel at the keyboard. Creating the verbal cue and waiting for the sublimity of every desire is mesmerizing, enthralling, even addicting but the impact on human creativity somehow feels like an accident waiting to happen. This profuse human/machine creativity resulting in AI artifacts sets up enormous challenges for all players in the creative industries, from the struggling artist or designer; to the public-funded institutions such as museums who will be wandering the labyrinth of copyright policies, trying to inscribe the metadata of the provenance of AI production. The paper will discuss Chat GPT and present AI imagery as doppelgängers that seemingly emerge out of an uncanny valley. The process is almost immediate with DALL-E2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion all providing instant results at the drop of a prompt. With a series of case studies, we will discuss the challenging copyright and provenance issues that are taking place at a dizzying pace as a sector that is striving to come to terms with the highly problematic issues of authenticity and ownership.