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Museum of Jewish Heritage Using AI So Visitors Can interact with Holocaust Survivors
By: Hellen Zaboulani
The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan is using artificial intelligence to help visitors connect with individuals who survived the atrocities of the Holocaust.
As reported by the NY Times, the museum is working to create an installation that will allow visitors to hear first-hand accounts of the cruelties imposed by the Nazis and about how they were able to survive and endure despite the odds stacked against them.
Firsthand accounts from survivors has always been the main method used by memorial institutions to keep the world from ever forgetting the barbaric mass murder attempt that was almost successful. Today, however, some 78 years after the Holocaust, the ranks of survivors is dwindling. Almost all of today’s survivors are in their 80s or 90s. There are currently only estimated to be 245,000 Holocaust survivors remaining worldwide, with 30,000 of the survivors residing in New York’s metropolitan area.
The museum has been working to keep their stories and their legacies alive and allow them to continue telling their story to future generations, so that we never forget. “What I care about is what your grandchildren’s grandchildren will know,” said Jack Kliger, the museum’s president and chief executive, whose parents are survivors.
The museum is preparing for “a post-survivor world,” Kliger told the Times. With a mission for “Never Again,” the museum wanted to offer more than the taped videos of individuals recounting the horrors they faced at the hands of a supposedly civilized nation which swiftly reached new heights of cruelty. Museum officials have turned to AI, in an effort to give viewers a wide range of survivors’ experiences, some who endured being shipped off to concentration camps, as well as others who fled or hid. The latest technology is specially equipped to process and file through scores of videos, and the new installation will utilize this capability to enable a one-of-a-kind interactive user experience.
As per the NY Times, the new installation, which will open in the Fall at the museum, will allow visitors to pose questions and see responses from different survivors, based on their query. An algorithm will find the most relevant prerecorded video clips from among the testimonies of 10 survivors selected by the museum from its speakers’ bureau. If the visitor asks, “What was concentration camp life like?”, the response could include a recently pre-recorded interview with Alice Ginsburg, 93, who tells about her life as a 13-year-old deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau with her family, never to see her mother and sister again.
A question like, “Were you hungry?,” might prompt responses from several of the survivors, including Mark Schonwetter, 90, who recounts being penned as a child with his mother and sister inside a Jewish ghetto, surviving on two daily helpings of thin soup and stale bread, later to endure three years of hiding in dense forests and farms.
The final details of the installation are not yet complete, but it will likely include a large-screen monitor that displays the video responses and a touch screen for visitors to ask questions by voice or text. Museum officials said they hope the experience will resemble an actual conversation.
“I want my story to go on long after I’m gone,” Ginsburg said in an interview last week. “I do speaking engagements but after a while I won’t be able to. I want to educate the public for years to come because after a while it will be forgotten just like the Inquisition has been forgotten — nobody talks about it anymore. And the persecution of Jews is an ongoing thing.”
