If you were to ask people how AI could change their lives, they may immediately think of self-driving cars and chatbots. In a business context, increased efficiencies and advanced data analytics would be among the likely responses. To get more news about culture and art, you can visit shine news official website.
But AI is also changing the arts, enriching people’s daily experiences, preserving culture and making art more accessible to those unable to visit a gallery or historic site for themselves.
In July 2019, Microsoft announced a new and fourth pillar to its AI for Good portfolio, the $125 million, five-year commitment to use artificial intelligence to tackle some of society’s biggest challenges. This new pillar will focus on AI for Cultural Heritage, and use AI to work with non–profits, universities, and governments to help preserve the languages we speak, the places we live, the artifacts we treasure and celebrate the people who have made an impact.
The program will build upon previous efforts including those in New York, with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MIT; in Paris with the Musée des Plans-Reliefs; and in southwestern Mexico, where Microsoft is engaged as part of ongoing efforts to preserve languages.
AI is also a creative force able to compose music, write novels and paint pictures. Here are seven examples of how AI is enriching our cultural lives.
The great buildings and historical sites of the world may attract millions of tourists a year, but many more people have only seen pictures. That is beginning to change.
Microsoft AI is being used to help preserve records of historic sites and bring people closer to some of the wonders of the world. Teams from the French company Iconem have used cameras and drones to create 3-D digital models of landmarks from Cambodia to Syria.
In Paris at the Musée des Plans-Reliefs, Microsoft partnered with Iconem and HoloForge Interactive to create an immersive experience using mixed reality and AI that pays homage to the French cultural icon Mont-Saint-Michel, off the coast of Normandy.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art launched its Open Access initiative in 2017, making all images and data relating to public-domain artworks in its vast collection available to everyone online. The Met recently collaborated with Microsoft and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to help take this initiative to the next level, using artificial intelligence to explore new ways for global audiences to discover, learn and create with one of the world’s foremost art collections.
There are more than 7,000 languages in the world, a third of which have fewer than 1,000 people who continue to speak them. In southwestern Mexico, Microsoft is engaged as one of the community partners in efforts to preserve languages spoken in the region, specifically Yucatec Maya and Queretaro Otomi. By using AI, Microsoft has helped to protect endangered languages.
Enigmatic expressions like those worn by the “Mona Lisa” or seen on the faces of countless statues of Buddha, invite the viewer to speculate on what the subjects was thinking or feeling.
But researchers in Japan are revolutionizing the way we think about this phenomenon, using facial recognition software. They used Azure Cognitive Services Face API to analyze 200 statues of Buddha, including the mysterious expressions of the Ashura Buddha at the Kofukuji Temple in Nara.
Traditionally, Buddhist statues would have shown faces devoid of emotion. But in their creation, the Kofukuji statues’ faces may have been influenced by their sculptors’ moods and may carry traces of detectable emotion, which the project sought to investigate. The aim of the project was “to provide people with a means for reaffirming the beauty of Buddhism,” according to Professor Syun’ichi Sekine.