AI and European Cultural Heritage: a powerful tool, an open responsibility

Cataloguing, translating, making millennia of history accessible. But who decides which memories to preserve — and through whose gaze?

Europe is going through a transition in which digital transformation is no longer merely a technological process, but a cultural and civilisational one. This is the starting point of the recent HASHT-AG blog post — Cultural Heritage in the Age of Digital Acceleration (May 2026) — and it sets the stage for reflecting on one of its most concrete dimensions: the role of artificial intelligence in heritage management.

The applications are already real. Computer vision systems automate the cataloguing of collections that remain largely inaccessible to the public; NLP tools transcribe and translate manuscripts in rare or ancient languages; generative models enable 3D reconstructions of destroyed sites — as in the case of Palmyra after 2015. The Europeana project, bringing together over 60 million digital objects from institutions across Europe, is exploring these technologies to expand the searchability of its archive. AI, in short, has the potential to democratise access to heritage that has historically been reserved for few.

“The real challenge is not whether cultural heritage should become digital. It is understanding under which values this transition should occur.”

But every AI system embeds choices. A model trained on datasets that reflect the major collections of Western Europe will tend to reproduce — and amplify — the same visibility asymmetries already present in the physical world. For a project like HASHT-AG, which foregrounds connections between Mediterranean cultures often marginalised in Eurocentric narratives, this is not a technical footnote: it is the foundational question.

At the governance level, the European AI Act introduces for the first time binding transparency and accountability obligations for high-impact systems — a first step toward a more plural digital cultural infrastructure. But regulation alone is not enough: critical education is essential. Engaging young people not as passive recipients of digitalised culture, but as subjects capable of questioning it — as HASHT-AG does through virtual exchange between youth from different countries — is the difference between digital literacy and genuine cultural citizenship.

Ultimately, the most urgent question is not technical. As the HASHT-AG blog put it: cultural heritage is not simply about preserving the past, but about protecting the conditions that allow societies to remain human while imagining the future. AI can serve this vision — provided that those who design and use it never stop asking: for whom, and with whose memory?