Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest tool for digital asset management (DAM) vendors. They advertise these tools as complete automation solutions, which free users from ever having to manually enter image tags again. CMS Wire brought this news to us in their article, “What it Will Take for Artificial Intelligence to Become Useful For DAM.”

As nice as that sounds, the results aren’t foolproof. Cataloging images is highly complex and far more interpretive than other forms of recognition (e.g. text analysis). To get the most out of a DAM system, all assets must be organized and identified in detail. The DAM system literally lives through its use and the data life cycle without categorizing, and tagging them is a recipe for digital mayhem. When tested with generic stock images, the results were fair across the board but issues do arise.

There is some skepticism as to whether AI will immediately prove itself useful to the DAM industry. Are the generic auto-suggested tags coming from APIs specific enough to be used for business? This means human intervention will still be needed to fully categorize images.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.