Website: https://holocaustresearchlab.com/ai-lab/
Principal Investigator(s): Todd Presner, Chair and Professor, Dept. of European Languages and Transcultural Studies
Started in Summer 2024, the AI and Cultural Heritage Lab is an extension of the Digital Humanities Holocaust Research Lab. In partnership with various digital libraries and archives, the AI Lab is investigating how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to enhance metadata, develop new finding aids and indexing systems, and deepen our analysis of complex cultural data. In partnership with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, we are currently investigating how LLMs generate responses to questions about Holocaust history, and comparing those responses to human-written content in the USHMM’s encyclopedia, typically one of the primary sources returned by Google for Holocaust-related searches. Our study aims to answer the following research questions: How do LLM outputs compare to the human-written content of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia in terms of factuality, nuance, tone, and completeness? To what extent do LLMs sanitize or neutralize sensitive content, particularly about the Holocaust, and how does this vary across models?