Toward XAI & Human Synergies to Explain the History of Art: The Smart Photobooth Project

Abstract

The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought about significant changes in our daily lives with applications including industry, smart cities, agriculture, and telemedicine. Despite the successes of AI in other “less-technical” domains, human-AI synergies are required to ensure user engagement and provide interactive expert knowledge. This is notably the case of applications related to art since the appreciation and the comprehension of art is considered to be an exclusively human capacity. This paper discusses the potential human-AI synergies aiming at explaining the history of art and artistic style transfer. This work is done in the context of the “Smart Photobooth” a project which runs within the AI & Art pavilion. The latter is a satellite event of Esch2022 European Capital of Culture whose main aim is to reflect on AI and the future of art. The project is mainly an outreach and knowledge dissemination project, it uses a smart photo-booth, capable of automatically transforming the user’s picture into a well-known artistic style (e.g., impressionism), as an interactive approach to introduce the principles of the history of art to the open public and provide them with a simple explanation of different art painting styles. Whereas some of the cutting-edge AI algorithms can provide insights on what constitutes an artistic style on the visual level, the information provided by human experts is essential to explain the historical and political context in which the style emerged. To bridge this gap, this paper explores Human-AI synergies in which the explanation generated by the eXplainable AI (XAI) mechanism is coupled with insights from the human expert to provide explanations for school students as well as a wider audience. Open issues and challenges are also identified and discussed.