The Nazis didn’t just take lives; they attempted to wipe entire cultures and their footprints off the face of the Earth. The Nazis stole hundreds of thousands of pieces of art and culturally significant objects from Jews during their reign, and getting them back has been a nearly century-long process that is far from complete.

As reported by NPR, researchers are now using AI to help restore some of the cultural artifacts the Nazis attempted to erase.  

The Nazis looted more than 600,000 works of art and objects of cultural significance from the Jews. Some have been recovered, some are lost forever, and there are over 100,000 still unclaimed. Finding them isn’t as easy as relentlessly scouring eBay. The records are scattered across the world, spread across several languages, if there even is any record of ownership at all.

AI Is Being Used to Track Art the Nazis Tried to Erase

Researchers at Santa Clara University think AI might be helpful in the search. Their AI tool, named AI Provenance Assistant, gathers together the vast amounts of paperwork and allows a user to ask questions in normal, human language and almost instantly return results that, say, let a user find out if a particular painting belongs to a specific Jewish art collector.

The tool falls more into the promising prototype category, as it only searches one database, while several other important archives yet to be digitized. Even then, many digitized records can be riddled with errors. And then there’s the matter of an AI not being able to offer the unique human perspective required to interpret various documents and put them in their proper historical context. A chatbot is going to untangle a complex matter of legal ownership and presented in a neat little correct answer within seconds.

It could help simplify an incredibly tedious, laborious process by noticing connections buried deep within enormous repositories of data. The Nazis went to incredible lengths to steal and erase as much of Jewish culture as they could. It’s taken some time, but we may have finally created a technology that can help reverse some of that damage.

and it’s probably a better use for the technology than generating videos of what superheroes would look like if they were different nationalities and ethnicities.