Sydney Jewish Museum exhibition uses AI to feature late volunteer

The Sydney Jewish Museum has unveiled a new display with one of the museum’s late volunteers featured.

Using artificial intelligence, the display features the late Eddie Jaku, a holocaust survivor who helped educate people and wrote a book about his life experiences.

Visitors to the museum can ask Mr Jaku a question and receive an answer in real time as though he was in conversation with them.

During his time in the Auschwitz concentration camp, his parents were murdered by the Nazis. As a skilled engineer, Mr Jaku was spared.

Mr Jaku was the author of the memoir The Happiest Man on Earth. He was a volunteer at the Museum from November 1992 to its closure due to the COVID pandemic in March 2020. He passed away on 12 October 2021, aged 101.

The museum’s current feature exhibit, honours Eddie and Flore Jaku’s life stories.

The exhibit is an example of what is sometimes called digital afterlife technology, which uses artificial intelligence and recordings of a person to create a facsimile of them.

For more information, visit the Sydney Jewish Museum’s Facebook page here.