Event Recap
June 5, 2025
Living Histories: AI as a Bridge to Cultural Heritage, Memory, and Belonging
# AI and Creativity
# AI Art
Reimagining the museum experience through AI-powered conversations with artifacts—fostering connection, curiosity, and cultural understanding.
Yochi Dreazen
Imagine stepping into a museum and being greeted by its artifacts—not by reading a label or listening to a pre-recorded audio guide, but by having a real-time conversation through your smartphone. You could ask the artifact to tell you its own story—and then keep going, one question at a time. It would be like talking to history, and having history talk back.
This new, AI-powered approach to transforming a traditional museum visit into an interactive experience was the central theme of the OpenAI Forum’s first-ever event in Asia, Living Histories: AI as a Bridge to Cultural Heritage, Memory, and Belonging, held at Singapore’s ATxSummit. The panel discussion highlighted a pioneering partnership between OpenAI, the Peranakan Museum, Singapore’s National Heritage Board, and Ask Mona, the French start-up that built the AI tool.
At OpenAI, we believe that AI is for everyone—and that it can be a powerful tool for fostering historical understanding, cultural connection, and civic belonging. As OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon made clear in his opening remarks, artificial intelligence can channel people’s innate curiosity and help them engage more deeply with other countries and cultures. “AI helps us engage in our curiosity in a way we might not do with a human guide,” he said. “It unlocks a different kind of cultural experience.”
As part of the new initiative, visitors to Peranakan Museum scan QR codes next to some of its most iconic and historically significant artifacts to begin the conversations. The technology enables visitors to explore not only the artifacts themselves but also the deeper histories, stories, and identities they represent. “This is not about replacing the museum—it’s about creating the spark, the doorway,” said Lum Jia Yi, an assistant director of the Peranakan Museum. “Just scan the code and start a dialogue. You’re no longer having a one-way conversation with an object.”
She highlighted two artifacts from the museum’s collection that visitors can now, in effect, talk to. The first is the kebaya—a traditional Peranakan blouse recognized by UNESCO for its cultural significance, intricate embroidery, and symbolic patterns. The second is the kamcheng, a porcelain jar historically used to store food during festive occasions, known for its vivid colors and ornate motifs.
Marion Carré, Ask Mona’s CEO and co-founder, said her team carefully trained their AI model to provide accurate, expert-approved information about each artifact to ensure that every conversation was both informative and wholly accurate. “Museums told us, ‘I don’t want AI to say something that’s not from the curators,’” she said. “That’s why we built the model on museum-approved content.”
Carré added that the power of the technology can be seen in how much more visitors who use AI engage with individual artifacts or pieces of a museum’s collection. “Visitors used to look at an artwork for five seconds. With AI, they now spend three to five minutes in front of it,” she said.
Professor Kwok Kian Woon, the vice chancellor of Singapore’s University of the Arts, Singapore, highlighted a different aspect of the partnership: AI’s ability to bridge generational divides and linguistic barriers by translating information about a given artifact into a wide array of different languages. “It can’t just be English as the lowest common denominator,” he said. “We are losing a lot in terms of cultural nuance and local flavors.”
Jervais Choo from Singapore’s National Heritage Board noted that AI can also unlock the hidden narratives behind the vast collections of museum holdings that are typically out of public view. Since only a small fraction of Singapore's national collection is on display at any given time, AI has the potential to make far more of the country’s history accessible—regardless of where someone lives or what language they speak. “Only about 5% of our national collection is on display,” he said. “That means 95% of our stories remain hidden—until now.”
Sandy Kunvatanagarn, who leads Asia-Pacific policy for OpenAI, closed by noting that the partnership showed the importance of using AI to support personalization and curiosity.
“You have to personalize the AI tools, because then that allows you to personalize your museum experience, your heritage experience, your cultural experience,” she said. “The second theme that's coming through very clearly is curiosity. It's really about how much you can use tools at your disposal to spark curiosity in whatever it is you're interested in. It could be culture. It could be whatever you want. And so I think those two things are really just very profound, powerful things.”
Access the home page of the AI Museum Experience created in collaboration with OpenAI, Ask Mona, and Perankan Museum "experience" here.
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