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AI and Cultural Heritage at CINECA
On 10 February 2023, CINECA, the most important supercomputing centre for scientific research in Italy and one of the most important worldwide, organised the third edition of the workshop AI AND CULTURAL HERITAGE, between research and creativity.
An event that the research centre proposes to open up to the public topics concerning the application and development of AI technologies to the field of cultural heritage, digital humanities, and even contamination with contemporary art.
Federico Bomba, president of Sineglossa and researcher Human Computer Interaction at the University of Bolzano, spoke to present what Sineglossa is doing on this front: the European Digital Deal project, for which we will produce an artistic work by the duo dmstfctn in residence at the Tecnopolo in Bologna on debunking and the fascination of truth.
The video of the speech can be retrieved at this link:
We spoke about art and artificial intelligence, and the importance of producing an “open” AI that can enable collaboration between artists and computer scientists, at last year’s CINECA workshop, which was followed by the publication of the multidisciplinary methodology between art, culture and artificial intelligence.
AI and Language at the Belleville School in Milan
On Thursday, March 7th, at the Belleville headquarters, Federico Bomba, along with researcher Diletta Huyskes and artist Ruben Spini, explored the connections between cutting-edge technology and the literary and artistic avant-gardes of the last century, in search of a broader perspective on our relationship with machines capable of generating language. The event was moderated by Andrea Cristallini.
AI and Copyright at the Chamber of Deputies
Can we talk about creativity and originality in the case of products made by machines? Can the machine create true art? Can it be considered a true author and thus possess legal personality concerning the ownership of the production? And above all, can copyright be the only way to protect artistic creation?
These issues are currently the focus of many parliamentary proceedings, starting with the Alessandro Amorese – FdI resolution (7-00185) on initiatives to ensure copyright protection in the context of the use of artificial intelligence technologies.
On 7 February, in a hearing at the Cultural Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, Federico Bomba spoke to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the Amorese bill and how to protect artistic work.
Among the aspects highlighted was the need for a long-term strategy on how to govern the major changes we are witnessing in the production of content in co-creation with generative AI. How to protect the work of artists?
The idea of copyright, as we have understood it so far, is not a necessary condition for cultural production, but only one of the possible forms of support for creation. A form that, among other things, concretely benefits large authors to the detriment of small authors, who represent the backbone of national creativity.
Federico Bomba, President of Sineglossa and researcher in Human Computer Interaction
Having a long-term strategy therefore means overcoming the idea of copyright and cultural content as market objects. Widening our gaze to the European horizon, the European Commission’s European Agenda for Culture outlines the need for a vision of culture that creates welfare, reinforces European values and democracy, rethinks our communities, and makes us economically competitive.
Authorship is increasingly a feature of the creative process shared between humans and machines, with a view to collaboration and co-participation in the artistic process. As generative AI advances, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish what is the result of human thought and what is the result of the machine.
We also spoke about co-creation and artificial intelligence at the Senate last year, giving the example of some projects curated by Sineglossa where such a process was activated, and at the last edition of Art Lab in September 2023, in a round table with Simone Arcagni, Luca Baraldi, Valentina Bondesan, Eleonora Brizi, Andrea Colamedici, Elisa Giaccardi, Giulia Marangoni and Mattia Pivato.
AI and art, our ongoing projects
Currently, Sineglossa is carrying out several cultural projects investigating what new challenges generative artificial intelligence technologies can open up in cultural production, what practices they can solve or simplify, and questioning the hidden criticalities and sometimes ignored discriminations that the development of these technologies entails.
In particular, in the more politically engaged sphere of our production, we are a partner in the three-year European Digital Deal project, within which we are conducting research on how art can contribute to debunking practices by harnessing the potential of truth appeal.
In this direction is the curatorship and production of the artistic residency of the duo dmstfctn. They’re creating a captivating 3D installation featuring models inspired by commedia dell’arte masks. Using a generative AI model, these models interact with the audience in real-time, playfully blurring truth by generating hallucinations, confabulations, and rumors. This project highlights the tendency of large-scale linguistic models to produce disinformation.
On the front of community participation and involvement, we conducted a series of workshops in Italy and other European educational and cultural centres, through the partnership of the Machines for Good project, and collected guidelines on how to exploit the potential of artificial intelligence for the activation of the people and citizens.
On 22 March, we will present the results of this workshop online:
The relationship of artificial intelligence with personal memories is instead the theme investigated by Argo, the exhibition project by artist Paolo Bufalini, curated by Sineglossa and winner of SIAE’s Per Chi Crea competition. The final work will be inaugurated in the autumn, which is a reflection on the concepts of memory and identity and the way Artificial Intelligence redefines our way of conceiving them.
Finally, publishing and journalism is an area where artificial intelligence seems to have become a key player: between Automatic Journalism, NLG Journalism (which uses natural language generation algorithms), and the adoption of various AI-based technologies and methods to optimise various elements of the journalistic process, newsrooms are realising the limits of how to use I from production to news gathering and distribution.
Sineglossa is addressing this issue in its new editorial platform Mangrovia, a digital newspaper that has been collecting and telling other stories about culture, technology and society through articles, podcasts and newsletters for the past month. Also integrated into the editorial workflow is a customised version, developed specifically for the project, of the artificial intelligence Asimov, a trend scouting tool from the Italian company Asc27, which supports the Mangrovia editorial team in identifying news.