Hi Lars,
There are a lot of uses for AI as a tool to assist in Exhibition Design. In my experience it excels at reducing labor for initial and repetitive tasks. Our Summer exhibitions last year was on AI. DataNation: Deocracy in the Age of AI and we needed to put the technology through it's paces to do our due diligence for content development and interpretation. Some things we learned are that language models like ChatGPT are useful to either rewrite something you have already produced into a differnet tone or for a different reading level. I.E. if a Botanists gives you 800 words for a Peer Journal you can quickly cut it down to 150 words for a 8th grade reading level. From that base you can work your interpretive magic to sculpt it the way you like.
The one thing to understand about AI is it isn't good for giving you exactly what you want, because often times people don't know what they want, just what they don't. AI thrives on very direct, concise directives. And has trouble riterating without being "seeded". This comes into play a lot of image generation through programs like Midjourney. If you want a specific picture of, say, "Abraham Lincoln riding a horse across the a bridge at dawn" it will give you a guy in a top hat that looks mostly like Lincoln on a horse on a bridge sometime in the morning, but that bridge may be the Golden Gate, and it may be a white horse instead of brown, etc. So you ask it for a
"Abraham Lincoln riding a brown horse across a covered bridge at dawn" and it will give you a guy with no hat, that looks nothing like lincoln on a brown horse on a covered bridge in a dutch village. And you go round and round. You could photoshop them altogether, but at that point you might have well just made what you wanted from scratch.
However, if you don't need super specific and are just adding some flavor or context to a text panel, it can give you amazing results quickly. In our exhibition we had a panel about "tracking cookies" so we asked midjourney to create an image of chocolate chip cookies on a plate but with computer chips instead of chocolate. It spat out a photorealistic image in about 30seconds that we put right on the wall and visitors loved it.
Another thing to know is that the models can learn quickly with examples. So with language models you can build seed documents that you enter with your prompts to help maintain consistency and output and familiarize it with what you want.
Anyway, hope this is helpful.
All the best,
Aaron Billheimer
Director of Exhibitions
National Liberty Museum
Philadelphia, PA, USA
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Aaron Billheimer
Director of Exhibitions
National Liberty Museum
Philadelphia PA
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-13-2024 04:35 AM
From: Lars Wohlers
Subject: AI as a tool for creating exhibitions
Hi everyone,
I am an interpretive consultant from Germany and part-time Professor for tourism management.
Currently I am trying to get a better handle on what AI means/can do for exhibit design. If you have any experience or you know any interesting article/book regarding this topis, I would love to hear from you.
Best from overseas,
Lars
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Lars Wohlers PhD
Founder and Owner of Interpretive Planning, Training, and Visitor Studies Company KON-TIKI
Heiligenthal
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