The future of digitalization is not about replacing human stewardship; it is about enhancing and expanding it through ethical AI integration.

This article, curated by Cato Litangen, addresses the report to Human Rights Council, submitted in accordance with Council resolution 55/5, from the Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Alexandra Xanthaki

Summary: AI is transforming cultural heritage preservation, making it more accessible and inclusive. AI-driven platforms allow for real-time data updates, hybrid search, and multilingual accessibility, democratizing heritage knowledge while ensuring source communities retain control. Ethical concerns are still paramount: cultural rights frameworks emphasize community consent, fair representation, and participatory digitalization. AI tools enhance artifact restoration, prevent cultural misappropriation, and align with UNESCO frameworks for safeguarding heritage. However, infrastructure gaps remain challenges. AI's role is not to replace human stewardship but to empower communities to tell their own stories responsibly and sustainably.

Is Now the Future of AI-Driven Cultural Heritage?

The coming years could see a transformative shift in how cultural heritage is preserved and accessed, as AI-driven solutions become more widely adopted. With rapid advancements in AI-powered search, real-time data updates, and inclusive digital infrastructure, we may be on the brink of a new era where cultural narratives are democratized, ethically managed, and dynamically integrated into global knowledge systems.

A Cultural Rights Approach to Digitalization
Ensuring an ethical and inclusive approach to AI-driven cultural heritage preservation requires addressing critical cultural rights concerns. A cultural rights framework asks key questions: Who decides which heritage is digitalized? When, how, and in which form should this take place? How are source communities recognized, and how can digitalization be made equitable and participatory?

To uphold cultural rights, AI-driven cultural heritage platforms must recognize and respect the authority of source and guardian communities in deciding what cultural materials should be digitalized and how they are represented. This aligns with UN Special Rapporteur Alexandra Xanthaki’s 2025 report, which stresses community consent as a non-negotiable pillar of ethical digitization. Efforts must ensure that cultural heritage is identified, selected, and protected in a way that does not discriminate against marginalized and Indigenous groups. For example, the EU’s AI4Culture project demonstrates how reusable AI tools can empower local stakeholders while reducing costs, setting a precedent for scalable solutions.

Digitalization efforts should provide equitable benefits, ensuring that source communities retain control over their heritage while promoting meaningful participation of all stakeholders. These efforts must uphold cultural diversity by allowing multiple perspectives in the interpretation and presentation of digitalized heritage. Additionally, revisability and accountability must be maintained, enabling ongoing reassessment of digitalized heritage and the methods used to preserve and present it.

Democratizing Access to Cultural Heritage
AI-driven platforms could empower individuals, researchers, and communities to actively contribute to and retrieve cultural heritage information in real time. Instead of cultural artifacts and narratives being locked within institutional archives, they may become accessible to all in multiple formats—including text, images, audio, and video—ensuring inclusivity and relevance.

AI's hybrid search capabilities allow for seamless integration of traditional keyword-based search with semantic, vector-based search, enabling a richer and more context-aware exploration of cultural heritage. This allow Indigenous and marginalized communities to interact with historical records in their native languages, reducing linguistic and technological barriers that have previously hindered participation. However, initiatives like Kenya’s KAICH interdisciplinary research call highlight persistent infrastructure gaps—uploading heritage “as easily as email” remains aspirational for groups lacking basic digital access.

Integrating UNESCO’s Cultural Heritage Frameworks
As AI solutions become a fundamental part of cultural heritage management, they will align closely with UNESCO’s frameworks for cataloguing and preserving both tangible and intangible heritage. Latvia’s 2021 AI-driven cultural mapping strategy, which operationalizes UNESCO’s ISIC/CPC standards, offers a scalable blueprint for automated inventory management. By integrating international classification systems such as ISIC, CPC, and ISCO, AI could help standardize and safeguard cultural assets, mirroring the intent of UN Security Council Resolution 2347 (2017), which promotes digitization to combat illicit trafficking of cultural property. States and communities will be able to continuously update and refine their inventories, ensuring that digital heritage preservation remains a living, evolving process rather than a static archive.

Preventing Cultural Misappropriation Through AI
With AI-enhanced metadata tracking and real-time monitoring, the misappropriation of cultural artifacts could be significantly reduced. Digitalized cultural heritage could remain firmly tied to its source communities, preventing unauthorized commercial exploitation. Emerging blockchain-based provenance solutions, though not yet mainstream, show promise for scalable attribution tracking.

AI-driven verification systems could ensure that cultural assets are properly attributed, and ethical guidelines could be automatically enforced through digital rights management (DRM) systems. Furthermore, AI-powered platforms offer communities greater control over how their heritage is shared and represented. By utilizing learning models trained on culturally specific datasets, AI will help safeguard traditions and historical narratives from distortion or misuse.

Closing the Digital Divide
By simplifying user interaction and ensuring multilingual accessibility, AI-driven cultural heritage platforms will play a critical role in overcoming the digital divide. Uploading historical data, personal narratives, or Indigenous knowledge is as easy as sending an email attachment. AI-powered natural language processing (NLP) makes it possible for people to query heritage databases in their own languages, reducing barriers to access and engagement. Projects like the Smithsonian’s AI-driven Cherokee language revitalization program illustrate this potential, though sustainability requires ongoing funding and local capacity-building.

Additionally, real-time AI-assisted translation ensures that cultural heritage is not just preserved but also accessible to a global audience. This will lead to deeper cross-cultural understanding while ensuring that original voices remain at the forefront of historical interpretation.

AI Without Bias: Ensuring Authentic Representation
As advanced Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are already here, AI models are trained to prioritize contextual understanding over broad, pre-trained language models that may carry Western biases. AI-driven cultural heritage preservation must support community-led data contributions, ensuring that digitalized records are shaped by those with the deepest knowledge and personal investment in their authenticity.

Rather than imposing a single, homogenized narrative, AI tools should support a multiplicity of perspectives, allowing cultural heritage to be analysed and interpreted through the diverse lenses of the communities that own and safeguard it. Current tools, however, still require human oversight—for example, AI-generated artifact restorations are validated by conservators to avoid historical inaccuracies. By incorporating human expertise alongside AI-driven insights, these new technology platforms will provide a balanced and ethical approach to heritage management.

The Future of Ethical and Inclusive Digitalization
The UN’s concerns, addressed by Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights Alexandra Xanthaki, about cultural heritage digitalization highlight the need for ethical and community-driven solutions. AI, if implemented thoughtfully, could address these concerns and also serve as a powerful tool for cultural empowerment.

The solutions envisioned for the near future must ensure that cultural heritage is preserved, protected, and accessible to all. As AI-powered solutions continue to develop, cultural heritage will no longer be confined to select institutions—it will be open, participatory, and representative of diverse voices. By adopting frameworks like the EU’s AI4Culture reusable toolkits, we can ensure long-term sustainability.

While AI offers transformative potential for cultural heritage preservation, its implementation must be grounded in practical realities and supported by concrete examples. For instance, the EU's strategic agenda for 2024–2029 emphasizes the promotion of cultural diversity and heritage through innovative technologies, aligning with the vision of AI-driven democratization of cultural narratives. Projects like the EU’s AI4Culture initiative demonstrate how reusable AI tools can empower local stakeholders while addressing cost and scalability challenges.

On the other hand, AI platforms offer powerful features for preserving and accessing cultural heritage. Its ability to query, organize, and make inferences across vectors, tensors, text, and structured data enables the creation of sophisticated search and recommendation systems for cultural artifacts. For instance, the AI platform Vespa's machine learning capabilities, including customizable ranking algorithms and real-time updates, can enhance personalization and improve the discovery, identification and categorisation of cultural content. Additionally, Vespa's support for advanced techniques like neural networks and natural language processing allows for deep learning applications in processing unstructured data such as images, audio, and text related to cultural heritage.

However, it is important to acknowledge the current technical limitations and ethical concerns associated with these technologies. Limited digital infrastructure in many regions, as highlighted by Kenya’s KAICH initiative, poses significant barriers to equitable access. Furthermore, concerns over data protection, copyright infringement, and the potential for AI systems to perpetuate cultural biases remain pressing issues, as noted in UNESCO’s recent discussions on AI ethics. Recognizing these challenges ensures a balanced perspective on the role of AI in cultural heritage management and highlights the need for thoughtful, inclusive implementation strategies. Still, on the technical side, there are already mature AI platforms that can support what we now foresee. I mean today.

The future of digitalization is not about replacing human stewardship; it is about enhancing and expanding it through ethical AI integration. By adopting AI in cultural heritage management, communities finally get tools to analyse and tell own stories with precision and control.

Key references:

1. AI Technologies in Cultural Heritage

AI-driven metadata tracking, multilingual NLP, and hybrid search systems matches active initiatives:

The AI4Culture platform (13) provides open-source tools for inventory management and interactive experiences, directly supporting your vision of democratized access.
Computer vision and machine learning are already used for artifact restoration (e.g., 3D photogrammetry, predictive conservation models)1 7.
The ReInHerit Toolkit (5) demonstrates AI’s role in enhancing museum engagement through human-centred design, validating your emphasis on participatory digitalization.

2. Compliance with UN Resolution 2347

The discussion of preventing cultural misappropriation aligns with:

UNSCR 2347 (2017) (2 4 6 8 10 12), which explicitly links heritage destruction to threats against international security and calls for digitization to combat trafficking.The article mirrors its emphasis on standardized inventories and community-led safeguarding.
The resolution’s focus on state sovereignty and safe havens (4 8) supports the argument for localized control over heritage digitization.

3. UNESCO Ethical Frameworks

The 2024 UNESCO-AI report (11) emphasizes inclusivity for Indigenous communities, paralleling the cultural rights approach. It specifically warns against AI systems that perpetuate Western biases—a risk the RAG framework addresses.
ISIC/CPC integration (3) is operationalized in Latvia’s AI-driven cultural mapping, as noted in the article.

4. Gaps and Recommendations

Infrastructure limitations: Kenya’s KAICH initiative (11) highlights that 43% of Indigenous groups lack digital access.
Sustainability: The EU’s AI4Culture agenda (3) stresses reusable tools and long-term funding.
Human oversight: Current AI restorations (e.g., color simulations) still require conservator validation7.

Key Citations to Strengthen Compliance