Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Modern day online Art repositories act as major gateways of dissemination for works of artistic importance and objects of cultural heritage, bringing both digital representation of the artworks and information about them to a global audience. The creation of proper metadata is an important and time-consuming process in and of itself, and although this information is essential it is not always suitable to help engage with the general audience. In order to achieve better engagement and optimize outreach, every work must be accompanied by insightful textual descriptions provided in multiple languages and accessible to all. This undertaking is an enormous task that has very high requirements in human resources. The enrichment process can be significantly facilized through the power of Generative Artificial Intelligence. This study discusses the integration of GenAI techniques aimed at enhancing content richness and improving accessibility in the Avarts Art Portfolio online repository, ultimately optimizing the provided user experience. The presented techniques leverage metadata and digital representations of artworks in order to create detailed artwork descriptions, translate multilingual content, provide easy-to-read engagement hooks and produce accessibility-oriented audio guide narrative scripts. The research pinpoints the challenges of implementing these processes in modern online art repositories and outlines a series of good practices. Moreover, it focuses on assessing the impact of their application on both the quantity and the quality of content and draws conclusions about the feasibility and usefulness of this integration.