ReactAI

Reactivating Creative Assets through Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence

Europe does not lack cultural content. It has millions of books, films, sound recordings, photographs and archival collections whose economic, cultural, educational and scientific value is not being fully realised.

Much has already been created, preserved and often digitised, yet remains difficult to discover, recommend, license and lawfully reuse.

Across film, music, literature and cultural heritage, the underlying problem is remarkably similar. Europe often possesses the cultural asset—and may already possess a digital copy—but lacks sufficiently complete, connected and trustworthy operational knowledge to put it back into circulation.

Reactivating cultural and creative assets

This is not simply a digitisation problem. It is a problem of activation and reactivation.

Preparing an under-documented asset for contemporary use can require the identification of works, people and organisations; reconstruction of metadata and provenance; rights research; contextualisation; and adaptation to current technical and market requirements.

ReactAI investigates how human-centred artificial intelligence can reduce these costs while keeping professional judgement, institutional authority, provenance and accountability visible.

A human-centred approach

ReactAI does not propose another foundation model or another central cultural database.

It investigates an effective division of labour between humans, AI systems and deterministic software. Computational systems can operate at scale while professionals retain meaningful control over the commitments and decisions for which they are accountable.

Human-computer interaction is therefore central: professionals must be able to inspect evidence and provenance, understand computational proposals, recognise uncertainty and disagreement, and intervene where their competence is required.

Working across institutional boundaries

Cultural knowledge is distributed across museums, archives, libraries, publishers, collecting societies, creative businesses, researchers and technology providers.

ReactAI investigates how independently governed organisations can use one another’s contributions while preserving provenance, authority, rights, policy constraints and responsibility.

The objective is not to replace this diversity with a central system, but to enable existing public and private infrastructures to work together more effectively.

Research & development

ReactAI brings together work on:

Cultural assets & documentary evidence → AI-assisted reconstruction → professional review → interoperable asset services → discovery · licensing · reuse · circulation