Devalued, annihilated, betrayed world and the failure of collective experience (memory, monuments, heritage, museums) to help it, is what I commented on at some lectures, the last ones being at Shanghai University, ICOM-IMREC, and 9th Nishan Forum on World Civilizations in Qufu in September 2023. With fragmentation and devaluation of professions and with advancing privatisation and monetization, - culture, including museums will suffer an assault which will either push them into servile servicing of some unengaged and neutral agenda or turn them toward a mercantilist stance. To be very direct, that is hardly distinguishable from any kitsch concept, - be it by concept or in execution.
AI is demonstrating the capacity to take over. It can fake human creativity and will be doing so at a frightening scale. It will shatter human values, imposing, say, that a museum needs to raise more money on its own. That is what most museums in the West increasingly do anyway. By the way, museums are, sometimes by their founding motives, irrational, emotional constructions, but to let AI decide upon these issues may lead to selling entire collections or closing down institutions. Always aware of our own imperfections, we change and try to negotiate with others their hierarchy of public importance, relevance and vitality in inventing a better self.
I was trying to signal, I admit, some weaknesses of the heritage sector that suddenly gained, in my opinion, rather frightening dimensions or capacities. That is the horror of, otherwise, docile, cultivated medium like museums which are largely comprehended as places where time, contemplation and wisdom have a chance.
By allowing the lowering of the criteria of human creativity and spirituality, we are ushering AI carelessly and rashly and by this are qualifying it as plausible and peer to human capacities.
How is this process encouraged? Largely by the society itself, using media for the interests of miniscule plutocracy that governs (western ) society by wealth, a system assured by the cohorts of politicians, media and corrupt organisations. They are degrading education, by promoting ignorance, by subverting professions... Among many things they have relativized in the name of solitary was social responsibility now lost in aimless individualism, the chaos was proclaimed as freedom. Imperceptibly, the acclamation "anything goes" was slowly transformed into "nothing matters.
This may allow, or should I admit quite surely, that AI starts to influence and then form and evaluate criteria of reality. However, it can hardly be more important that the latter must remain the mandate of humans otherwise we shall be lost in the ethereal kaleidoscopic lacuna of manipulated illusions. Museums are about the relevant, plausible, stable, useful and dependable reality: this is why they recognize, select, care, study and communicate what is quality filtered social, collective experience to construct the best usable future.
Of course, museums were rarely, if ever, a subject in the ongoing fervent discussions of AI and its impacts. That is because they are not perceived as a profession and, secluded from their natural context (the complex of public memory institutions) they may seem relevant enough but not crucial. When concert halls, once famous for their specificity share conductors or even orchestras to survive the financial constraints, is no different from what museums do when sharing exhibitions or when they suffer the unfair competence of versatile, private and very commercially tuned professional exhibition dealers and organisers.
The loss of reality, of the ability to grasp it will push us into a void where AI might become perceived as a better and superior us, - a sort of fake realisation of any legitimacy of eugenic dream, - of advancing as mankind. Can we be that fatal ally of AI? Will museums as guards of continuous reality be a subscriber of surrender, - involuntary and unwitting.
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