NEWS

Mori Art Museum Collaborates with AI to Create an Exhibition Title

2019.8.29 [Thu]

Mori Art Museum has collaborated with the “IBM Watson” (hereinafter “Watson”) suite of AI (artificial intelligence) to come up with the title for an exhibition that is to open on Tuesday, November 19, 2019 and to run until Sunday, March 29, 2020. The title chosen from over 15,000 AI-generated options is now finalized as Future and the Arts: AI, Robotics, Cities, Life - How Humanity Will Live Tomorrow.

Background to the Project

Future and the Arts: AI, Robotics, Cities, Life - How Humanity Will Live Tomorrow will contemplate cities, environmental issues, human lifestyles and the likely state of human beings as well as human society, all in the imminent future, via cutting-edge developments in science and technology including AI, biotechnology, robotics, and AR (augmented reality), plus art, design, and architecture influenced by all these. As part of the early planning stage to make the exhibition interdisciplinary and extend beyond the domain of art, the Museum has had a series of collaborative discussions with IBM Japan, the forerunner of AI development and performance, on possibilities to incorporate AI in the project. By utilizing Watson’s technologies, including natural language understanding, concept extractions and extraction of large amounts of data, Mori Art Museum created an AI-generated title for the exhibition.

Process Leading to Determining the Exhibition Title

First, Mori Art Museum provided Watson with a range of text data including planning documents for the exhibition, titles of its exhibitions over the past fifteen years, and interviews with Director Nanjo Fumio who is the curator of the exhibition. Watson then analyzed the collected data, extracted keywords for the exhibition such as “Future,” “Arts,” and “Human,” and finally generated word combinations of 15,000 titles. From there, AI narrowed the selections down to around 150 from which one was selected by the the project team following further rounds of discussion: Future and the Arts: AI, Robotics, Cities, Life - How Humans Will Live Tomorrow.
Okada Akira, Senior Managing Consultant, GBS iX, IBM Japan notes, “Applying AI to creativity like this is challenging work - analyzing the backgrounds of large amounts of phenomena and contexts to identify/pinpoint patterns of inspirations and imaginations. It would be pleasing if AI technology could spread to the public in the domains of ideas and expressions to expand human creative activities.” Mori Art Museum Director Nanjo Fumio also states, “Creativity isn’t generated from nothing but from the unexpected connections of things and ideas. Watson proposed all sorts of thinkable words, but from there, it had been a collaborative work between us and Watson. I imagine this may be how humans and AI will interact in the future.”

What Is “IBM Watson”?

IBM Watson is IBM Corporation’s enterprise AI service, application and tool. With three layers of AI models and IBM’s extensive specialist knowledge, IBM Watson is capable of efficient learning without learning from scratch. It is also the best AI for business applications as all its enterprise AI apps can be managed in one place.