GLAMorous AI TL;DR — Autumn 2025

Author

Alphaeus Lien-Talks
October 16, 2025

By Alphaeus Lien-Talks | October 2025

“Every interface, every algorithm is a curation — and that curation tells a story.”

- A. Lien-Talks

Welcome back to GLAMorous AI, your bite-sized roundup of what’s new, weird, and worth knowing in the world of AI + Cultural Heritage.
This season’s theme: turbulence and opportunity.

AI is reshaping how we preserve, present, and protect heritage — but it’s also testing the limits of infrastructure, ethics, and trust.

⚠️ System Pressure: AI Bots Are Crashing the Archives

AI scraper bots are hammering museum and archive servers, hoovering up open data for training.
Institutions report outages, bandwidth spikes, and lost control of digital infrastructure.
💡 Add rate limits, API keys, and “scrape-aware” policies before the bots do.
🔗 Read more →

🧩 Fresh Research Highlights

🧠 Interaction Design for AI Heritage

A new structured workflow shows how AI can fit within exhibition design — from ideation to evaluation.
🔗 Read more →

🖼️ “Draw Me a Curator”

AI image models imagine curators as mostly young, white, and male.
Generative bias meets museum representation — and it’s not pretty.
🔗 Read more →

🖌️ Multimodal Art History

Five centuries of art analysed through generative embeddings: context > colour.
A new kind of AI art history is emerging.
🔗 Read more →

🏛️ In Practice: Museums Get Experimental

🎙️ AI Holograms Expand Survivor Testimonies

The Illinois Holocaust Museum now features a Rwandan-genocide survivor avatar.
Ethical storytelling meets conversational AI.
🔗 Read more →

🐆 AI Art Residencies Go Wild

Artist Violeta Ayala’s Huk, The Jaguaress blends robotics, myth, and ecology — an AI guardian of the Amazon.
🔗 Read more →

🧠 Ethics & Power

🤖 Algorithmic Curation = Curatorial Power

Arantes (2025) argues algorithms are curators.
Make them visible, editable, and contestable — or risk invisible bias shaping cultural memory.
🔗 Read more →

🗣️ Public Trust Gap

Analysis of 2022–24 social media:

  • Museums → optimism

  • Archives → anxiety
    AI trust depends on visibility and storytelling.
    🔗 Read more →

❓ Big Question

Who curates the curators?
As AI mediates access, discovery, and storytelling — the governance of those systems is cultural heritage work.

💬 About

I’m Alfie, a researcher and archaeologist exploring where heritage, ethics, and AI meet.
This digest keeps things short, critical, and useful — no jargon, no hype.

👉 Subscribe or read more at glamorousai.beehiiv.com
👉 Get in touch with ideas, projects, or provocations