Can AI revitalize ancient literature in the form of contemporary visual art to enhance its attraction? Ballads Illusion is a Human-AI collaboration artwork created with the metadata for English ballads provided by the National Library of Scotland. It aims to enhance the accessibility and attraction of cultural heritage to the people outside the cultural context. We focused on a special group—the "outsides" of British culture and investigated their interests in the English ballads.
The team expresses perceptions of the cultural heritage with sketches as visual narratives. A Generative Adversarial Network was trained with over 10,000 Scottish paintings, which empowered the sketches into novel representational possibilities. The trans-media approach preserved, presented and strengthened outsiders' understanding of cultural heritage with a vivid and affectionate insight. The cycle of empathy and creation from people, as the democratization, is expected to promote the development of participatory culture. Furthermore, the participatory Human-AI collaboration tries to search the boundary of art in the era of AI and provoke discussion about the nature of art and the significance of AI-generated art with explicit intent.
