INTERVIEW
ONLINE COPYRIGHT CONFERENCE 2024 Thursday 23 May
Where AI and Heritage clash
Among the many friction points between AI and heritage organisations, copyright is one of most significant says Dr Mathilde Pavis, the legal consultant commissioned by National Lottery Heritage Fund to brief heritage organisations on how to plan for AI. Mathilde is a keynote speaker at 2024 CILIP Copyright Conference on 23 May and you can book your place at
www.cilip.org.uk/CopyrightConf24.
THE huge range of heritage organisations and the equally huge range of digital development they may have achieved, makes an assessment of their AI needs difficult.
Mathilde Pavis, the author of the Digital Heritage Leadership Briefing: Artificial Intel- ligence, said: “The main aim of the AI briefing is to inform heritage professionals about key features of AI. The briefing was designed as a starting point for organisations who want to assess whether AI is for them or not.” Many institutions may still be struggling with fundamental digital issues while others have al- ready undertaken complex and successful work in AI. For example, AI is already being used to create metadata, identify plants, predict the popularity of exhibitions, and detect colonial bias in collections. These are just a few of the sector-specific projects listed in the briefing as examples. But Mathilde also points out that AI is just as likely to be used in a heritage organ- isation’s business management operations as it is in the management and research of their collections.
In this Q&A, ahead of the upcoming 2024 CILIP Copyright Conference in May, Mathilde focuses more on the copyright angle.
Information Professional – Could you describe your career and work and how this led to your work for the National Lottery Heritage Fund?
32 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Rob MacKinlay (
rob.mackinlay@
cilip.org.uk) is a journalist at Information Professional
Mathilde Pavis (MP) – I trained in law in France and the UK before I became an aca- demic specialised in Intellectual Property Law. I specialise in the digitisation and commercial- isation of content which includes people’s faces, voices and bodies. At the time I did my PhD (in 2013-2016), this topic was described to me as “very theoretical” and with no practical rele- vance because all of the issues where managed by contracts or “gentlemen’s agreement”. But I was interested, so carried on. And this led me to work with museums, who were interested in digitising complex or sensitive materials. Fast-forward five years, with AI making its way into almost every aspect of our lives, my ‘theoretical’ research became very practical, very quickly. At that point, I started my consul-
April-May 2024
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