The Met launches AI tools to explore art collections with Google

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced two new generative AI initiatives developed in partnership with Google Arts & Culture, marking a milestone in their 15-year collaboration. The first initiative emerged from a six-month Technologist in Residence program in which The Met engaged creative technologist Julia Daser to investigate how generative AI could enrich museum visits. Using Google Gemini and Vertex AI, Daser worked closely with museum curators to rapidly build and test prototypes directly inside the gallery spaces, allowing real-world validation of the tools.

The second initiative, Art Aura, is an interactive, multimodal AI experience developed by the Google Arts & Culture Lab and The Met. Powered by Google Gemini, Art Aura enables users to interact with The Met's collection in a novel way: by dragging artworks, artistic styles, or descriptive phrases into a digital zone, users can uncover hidden thematic connections spanning centuries of work. This generates what the announcement describes as a personalized portrait of the user's unique artistic taste. The tool taps into The Met's digitized holdings, which now number over 200,000 objects and are accompanied by 50 curated stories.

These launches build on a two-decade arc of digital access at the museum. In 2011, The Met first invited audiences to virtually visit the museum, and in 2018, it made its entire Open Access collection available digitally. The new AI initiatives represent a shift from viewing art as a searchable archive to enabling active, personalized discovery. Both tools are now accessible via a new Google Arts & Culture landing page dedicated to The Met, positioning generative AI as a bridge between the museum's physical and digital experiences.

The Metropolitan Museum's partnership with Google Arts & Culture has spanned 15 years, progressively expanding digital access to art. The museum first invited virtual visits in 2011, then opened its collection digitally in 2018. These two new AI tools represent an evolution of that mission: moving from static digital archives to interactive, personalized experiences that help visitors and online users discover connections they might not otherwise find.

The six-month Technologist in Residence program signals The Met's deliberate approach to AI adoption. Rather than simply deploying off-the-shelf tools, the museum engaged Julia Daser to work directly with curators inside the galleries, allowing prototypes to be tested in real exhibition spaces before broader release. This hands-on validation likely ensures the AI tools serve genuine curatorial and visitor needs. Art Aura, the consumer-facing product, translates this research into a multimodal experience where users can input text, styles, or visual elements to uncover thematic patterns across the collection—a form of computational exploration that would be impractical for a human visitor to perform manually.

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