David Livingstone Birthplace Joins PHAWM Project to Enhance AI Trust and Accuracy in Cultural Heritage
Here at the David Livingstone Birthplace, we proudly announce our involvement with the PHAWM (Participatory Harm Auditing Workbenches and Methodologies) project. The project aims to create a digital user interface that will utilise generative AI to aid us in auditing and organising our collections. AI is a hot-button topic at the minute - and rightly so - as it affects all of our day-to-day lives in ways that we sometimes are not even aware of. This can range from search engine optimisation (SEO), and social media algorithms to the digital assistant present on most modern smartphones like Siri on iPhones, or Gemini on Google Pixels. There is an understandable lack of trust in AI systems which acts as a significant barrier to their deployment due to their perceived inaccuracy and inherent biases, which is where organisations like ours come in.
Our role in this project will be to audit the auditor. For the cultural heritage sector in particular, these issues of inaccuracy and bias can be incredibly damaging. The situations caused by these problems can include misrepresentation due to the AI perceiving a pattern that needs to be present, historical bias arising from the data, or lack of consideration of the context in which historical events have occurred. Therefore, through the course of the project - with the use of datasets provided by ourselves - and the National Library of Scotland and Museum Data Service - we will assist in fact-checking and auditing the generative AI’s output. The system that we will be aiding the development of will include the reasoning of the AI - the steps that it took to generate the content - which will allow us to assess the accuracy of the inferences made by the generated data and whether there are any systemic biases or stereotypes in such inferences which may result in unfair and harmful assertions.
This project is incredibly impactful and pulls together the talents of seven academic institutions from across the country as well as over two dozen partner organisations ranging from ourselves at the David Livingstone Birthplace, the NHS NSS, Nokia, the National Library of Scotland, Microsoft, Scottish AI Alliance, and Museum Data Service. We are excited to be involved in exploring the potential uses of AI and other cutting-edge technologies that can assist us in giving our visitors and guests the best possible experience.
To find out more about the project and the other organisations involves, please check out the PHAWM web site at https://phawm.org/
