‘Chattable’ Avatars: Using LLMs to power visitor engagement with historical persons

Cultural Heritage institutions such as Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums are tasked with preserving our history and heritage for future generations while engaging new audiences with an appetite for said engagement to be increasingly digital and interactive. To explore how advances in natural language processing, particularly large language models (LLMs), may help GLAMs in their mission, we designed a prototype ‘Chattable’ avatar, a 3D high-polygon animated character which visitors can talk to and interact with. We report the design of our avatar, and a workshop we conducted with curators and staff from a GLAM institution, to understand the problems, requirements, and opportunities LLMs present in the cultural heritage space. We present results from a qualitative analysis of our workshop highlighting themes such as trust, authority, social experience, and location, finding LLMs may be more suited to deployments focused on non-factual data dissemination. We conclude with implications for GLAMs and suggestions for future research to realise how best to integrate GenerativeAI like LLMs into the GLAM space.