Artificial Intelligence: Augmenting Your Cultural Heritage Society

As volunteer leaders of Sottish heritage societies, we are often overwhelmed with trying to accomplish too much with too few resources. Plus, we often do not have access to the skill sets required for many of those tasks. That is exactly where “artificial intelligence” can help.

Whether you realize it or not, AI is already all around us. Some of the most common uses include autocorrect systems, autocomplete and predictive text tools, voice assistants, smart home devices, navigation apps, facial recognition, and personal assistants.

During the Spring 2025 Annual General Meeting of Scots in Canada (formerly Clans and Scottish Societies of Canada or CASSOC), President Bill Petrie provided an overview of what he called “augmented intelligence.”

He differentiated between artificial intelligence as systems that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence; machine learning as systems that improve through experience without explicit programming; and deep learning which is advanced machine learning using neural networks with multiple layers.

Scottish heritage societies are not alone in grappling with understanding and using AI. According to a 2024 survey of over 1,300 nonprofits, only about 45% have some understanding of AI. (Source: The State of AI in Nonprofits: Benchmark Report on Adoption, Impact, and Trends. Joe DiGiovanni and Janelle Levesque. 2025. TechSoup and TAPP Network.)

Some of the most popular uses are generative AI for creating new content such as images and text, speech recognition, predictive analytics, marketing automation, virtual assists, and ChatBots. Here are a few examples of how AI can help you and your society.

MyHeritage offers several AI-powered tools for enhancing, colorizing, and animating historical photos, helping users bring family memories to life. Reimagine is a dedicated app that scans, restores, enhances, colorizes, and animates old photos. MyHeritage In Color™ automatically colorizes black-and-white photos, making historical images more vivid. Photo Enhancer improves resolution and sharpness, making blurry faces clearer. Deep Nostalgia™ animates faces in old photos, creating short, lifelike movements. PhotoDater™ uses AI to estimate when a photo was taken based on visual clues.

Generating images is the most popular use of generative AI. Here are some of the most useful tools as reviewed by the staff of CNET: Dall-E 3 by OpenAI, Leonardo AI, Adobe Firefly, and Canva. (Katelyn Chedraoui. May 2, 2025. “Best AI Image Generators of 2025,” CNET)

We know that younger people respond more to videos and podcasts. That’s why you need more AI tools to help you provide innovative content. Here are some examples: Otter can develop transcripts and show notes, Fathom generates meeting summaries, Descript transcribes the audio, Swell AI turns your podcast audio into articles, Munch  extracts the most engaging clips from long-form content, Synthesia helps create online courses, Pika Labs allows users to generate short videos, ChatGPT and Google Gemini are both AI chatbots built on large language models, D-ID creates animated characters and interactive educational material from existing photos, Adobe Express creates YouTube and blog post thumbnails. (Fei Wu and Amy Kim. June 24, 2024, “10 AI-Powered Tools Your Favorite Creators Are Already Using,” CNET)

This is just a summary of the complete article. If you are a Delegate or Alternate of a COSCA Organizational Member, you can access the complete article with many more details, links to the AI tools, and actual examples from one clan society: https://www.cosca.scot/artificial-intelligence