Ethics of Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage: Opportunities and Challenges

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years and has significantly impacted various domains, including cultural heritage. Indeed, AI technologies offer unprecedented capacities to analyze huge amounts of historical data, enabling researchers and art historians to uncover precious patterns, connections, and insights that might otherwise remain elusive. Also, the efficiency and accuracy of AI techniques play a pivotal role in many cultural heritage-related tasks, such as cataloging and organizing extensive cultural collections, streamlining the management of heritage resources for present and future generations. However, the integration of AI in cultural heritage also brings forth intricate ethical questions. These span over the issues of authenticity, subjectivity, and interpretation biases of an AI-empowered, reproduced, and/or generated artwork up to the legal concerns related to authorship. However, such issues are mostly undefined and unaddressed in the scholarship at the intersection on AI, ethics, and cultural heritage. This paper aims to pave the way to fill such a gap of context-sensitive ethical issues for AI in cultural heritage. To this aim, the paper first analyzes the main opportunities and benefits raised by AI in cultural heritage. Then, matching benchmark, agreed-upon AI ethics principles elaborated in the AI ethics scholarship in the last decade and relevant to cultural heritage, it highlights specific ethical risks that ought to be considered for the development and deployment of trustworthy AI in and for cultural heritage. Finally, areas requiring further attention and work, and actors call to intervene, are identified to facilitate next steps for ethics and governance of AI in cultural heritage.