Art Exhibit — "Act as if you are a curator: an AI-generated exhibition"

This year the Nasher Museum embarked on an experiment to use AI to curate an exhibition from the museum’s collection. While museum professionals are far from relinquishing control of exhibition making and interpretation, this exercise is a powerful way to explore the applications of AI in the creative realm as related to curatorial
authorship and expertise, the subjectivity of the selection process, and the future impact of technology on museums.

Students and faculty in Duke’s Art, Art History and Visual Studies Department and the Duke Digital Art History and Visual Culture Research Lab began by creating a tool to extract publicly accessible information from the museum’s collection database. This dataset of nearly 14,000 objects in the Nasher Museum’s collection was further transformed into machine-readable data that is understandable by OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform. The team further developed a series of prompts and instructions for ChatGPT that asked it to select artworks for the exhibition. A similar process was incorporated in the creation of the accompanying wall and label texts.

Tu-Sa 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Su 12-5 p.m.