Living Museum

The Living Museum is a museum exhibit from the future, powered by AI.

Visitors can search over a museum’s collection semantically using natural language, with queries like “pottery from ancient rome”, “aboriginal australian tools”, “modern art in the style of andy warhol”, etc. They can also have conversations with individual artifacts, which have complete knowledge about themselves and their origins. Visitors can ask them about the time period when they’re from, what life was like back then, how they came to be, and how they ended up in the museum.

I originally wanted to build an AI-powered search engine over the British Museum’s collection, so I scraped 2.5 million artifacts from them. But then I experimented with the personification angle, and found it very compelling as a completely novel modality for educating the public about history and culture.

Editor’s note: It’s about 95% done, just working out some glitches in the UI, esp. on mobile. If you’re testing this, and run into issues with searching, just try rerunning or waiting – there’s a cold start bug with the db, it can take time to warm up right now, but I’m working on it!