Special issue: Investigating the Relationship between Generative Artificial Intelligence and History Education
Introduction
The implications of the emerging post-survivor era are increasingly being felt in Holocaust education: the end of the Second World War and the liberation of concentration camps occurred 80 years ago, and with the ageing population of Holocaust survivors, their testimonies as direct connections to this genocide are critically endangered (Ionescu and Mitroiu, 2023). This shift has been realised by several institutions, such as the University of Southern California (USC) Shoah Foundation and the Sydney Jewish Museum (SJM), who invite survivors to attend interviews with the purpose to preserve oral testimonies using natural language-processing (NLP) artificial intelligence (AI). Dimensions in Testimony (DiT), as a key example of such a practice, provides a catalyst for comprehending the consequences of this shift: there is a risk that historical information – rather than other elements of human experience – solely drives the testimony. Thus, the role of museum educators is increasingly shifting to that of a communicational ‘medium’ (Ballis, 2022) to facilitate museum visitor interactions with specially filmed testimony.
With a Holocaust survivor providing testimonies in ‘live’ contexts, educators facilitate visitors’ interpersonal connections so there is a shared witnessing of the past, while also considering forms of testimony as ways to reclaim a traumatic past (Shenker, 2024). The addition of ‘interactive video testimonies’ (Boswell and Rowland, 2023, p. 38) raises the particular issue of retaining the complexity of human experiences with an eye to how present and future generations will be influenced by them (Bauer, 2016). As a result of these considerations, there is a need for museum educators to establish a balance between pedagogical content knowledge, audience historical understanding, survivor testimony content and NLP AI awareness to complement the use of interactive video testimonies.
This article features an analysis of interviews held with museum educators in 2024 to gauge how the application of DiT at the SJM is posing opportunities and challenges as part of Holocaust education. It is guided by the research question ‘how can museum educators work with interactive video testimonies to generate historical consciousness?’ in order to situate NLP AI-driven testimony experiences in relation to the roles museum educators and museums play in attempts to operationalise historical consciousness for educational purposes (see, for instance, Nordgren, 2019; Popa, 2021). Throughout this article, specific terminology in line with the language used by Boswell and Rowland (2023) is used to position testimony facilitated by NLP AI as differentiated from traditional, ‘live’ testimony. The phrases ‘interactive video testimony’ and ‘virtual survivor(s)’ (Boswell and Rowland, 2023, p. 38) are used to situate interactive testimonies (such as DiT) as participatory experiences based on human-supplied and filmed data.
The first section is an overview of theoretical understandings about historical consciousness in terms of how Gadamer (1987) and, subsequently, Rüsen (2004) provide the basis for how museum educators and teachers might work with testimonies so they are aligned with school curricula. This sketch provides the educational context for the research design, which situates the work of museum educators in relation to how they facilitate interactive and uniquely situated representations of the past. Three key dilemmas face museum educators in this emerging post-survivor era, which include how to: (1) articulate the historical context of the Holocaust with fidelity to the sources; (2) address, with an educative purpose, underlying causes of political polarisation (such as forms of racial and religious discrimination); and (3) communicate according to the stated purposes of their institution. Such issues provide the platform for the research methodology (which is a context-specific discussion of the research site, participants and approaches to data collection and analysis) and is followed by a thematic analysis of interview data. These elements of the article frame a discussion about pedagogical considerations for educators and suggest what changes might be needed to optimally engage with interactive video testimonies to ensure that they facilitate ethically produced, intergenerational learning opportunities about the Holocaust.
Historical consciousness and museum educators’ practice
Historical consciousness is central to museum educators’ work, as the material remnants of the past require recontextualisation when placed within exhibition (virtual and physical) – or other public – spaces in an institution. These professionals ensure that educational experiences for visitors can be a process of meaning-making rather than accidental learnings. Such guidance includes reinforcing the purposes of the institutions and how they influence the interpretations of sources in exhibition spaces. To this end, recent discussions about the adaptation of historical consciousness in educational settings (such as Nordgren, 2019; Popa, 2021; Wallace-Casey, 2017) constitute a confluence between localised traditions in historical consciousness and education, with expectations about what aspects of the past are most useful for present and future generations to actively identify with – and participate in – each community.
Gadamer’s (1987) understanding of the concept of historical consciousness as an engagement with the ‘full awareness of historicity of everything present and the relativity of all opinions’ (p. 89) (cf. Clark and Peck, 2018; Edling et al., 2020) is relevant in an educational context, including museums. This point is elaborated on by Rüsen (2004) as part of his well-cited typology of historical consciousness, which is shown in Table 1.
Typology of historical consciousness (source: Rüsen, 2004, p. 72)
| Traditional | Exemplary | Critical | Genetic | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Experience of time | Repetition of an obligatory form of life. | Representing general rules of conduct or value systems. | Problematising actual forms of life and value systems. | Change of alien forms of life into proper ones. |
| Patterns of historical significance | Permanence of an obligatory life form in temporal change. | Timeless rules of social life, timeless validity of values. | Break of patterns of historical significance by denying their validity. | Developments in which forms of life change in order to maintain their permanence. |
| Orientation of external life | Affirmation of pre- given orders by consent about valid common life. | Relating to peculiar situations to regularities of what happened and what should occur. | Delimitation of one’s own standpoint against pre-given obligations. | Acceptance of different standpoints within a comprising perspective of common development. |
| Orientation of internal life | Internalisation of pre-given life forms by limitation role-taking. | Relating to self- concepts to general rules and principles – role legitimisation by generalisation. | Self-reliance by refutation of obligations from outside – role-making. | Change and transformation of self-concepts as necessary conditions of permanence and self-reliance – balance of roles. |
| Relation to moral values | Morality is dictated by obligatory orders, moral validity as unquestionable stability by tradition. | Morality is the generality of obligation in values and value systems. | Breaking the moral power of values by denying their validity. | Temporalising of morality; chances of further development become a condition of morality. |
| Relation to moral reasoning | The reason of values is their effective pre- givenness, enabling consent in oral questions. | Arguing by generalisation, referring to regularities and principles. | Establishing value criticism and ideology critique as important strategies of moral discourses. | Temporal change becomes decisive argument for the validity of moral values. |
Rüsen’s (2004) typology gestures to the breadth of experiences and relationships people might cultivate as part of developing historical consciousness. They are transferrable to examples of how these observations map onto the SJM, as found in the progression through the testimony experiences within the institutional interpretive and physical frameworks. The first sections of educational programmes, which feature museum educators tapping into traditional forms of historical consciousness, provide the means for awakening visitors’ prior historical awareness of the Holocaust. They are then moved from an exemplary, more generalised perspective, to hone in on specific personal experiences referenced by material objects throughout the SJM as part of immersing them in an ongoing dialogue with the past. By contrast, the later stages are characterised by engagements with critical and genetic forms that involve orienting visitors towards survivors’ memories of the Holocaust, including how they have made meaning of a catastrophe, while attempting to rebuild their lives in Australia. In turn, this sequence frames a moral consciousness about these human experiences, which provides the seeds for empathetic understandings that might only be realised after visitors’ time in the museum has concluded. This shift between two of Rüsen’s (2004) typologies works to explicitly communicate the purposes behind the structure of the SJM and the sequences that visitors engage with in the exhibits. These measures work to eke out specific experiences within a morass of other catastrophes during the Second World War, to ensure the impacts of the Holocaust might be understood on their own terms. Such precautions work to prevent a conflation of other examples of history with this genocide. The significance of these guardrails is described by Shenker (2015), where the ‘various modes of Holocaust representation ... have served as a universalising standard by which we measure the destruction of every other community’ (p. 192).
The forms of progression in capacities for complex thinking have underpinned much scholarship about historical consciousness in educational contexts (for example, Ahonen, 2005; Carroll, 2020; Clark and Peck, 2018; Seixas and Morton, 2013), as well as being cited in the curriculum context of the SJM – New South Wales’ state-based curriculum and the nationwide Australian curriculum. While the former largely divided elements of historical consciousness into how they could be operationalised in teaching and learning (Nally and Sharp, 2025), the Australian curriculum develops the concept by incorporating a variety of localised historical perspectives, in particular Deep Time from Indigenous cultures (for more on this topic in a New South Wales context, see Westaway et al., 2024). Table 2 shows how these references align with frequently cited scholars, the Australian curriculum’s references to historical consciousness and the SJM’s aims.
Historical consciousness in the Australian curriculum and at the SJM
| Features of historical consciousness | Australian curriculum (content points relevant to the Holocaust) |
SJM (aims) |
|---|---|---|
| Establishing general rules from specific examples in history, before testing their validity by applying them to other case studies (Rüsen, 2004). | Investigating the scale and significance of the Holocaust using primary and secondary sources, such as survivor testimonies (Year 10). | Cultivate a shared understanding of the Holocaust and its ongoing impacts among the general public. |
| Points of similarity, contestability and difference that are present between historical interpretations (Chapman, 2011; Popa, 2021; Seixas, 2016, p. 435). | Analysing the causes and conditions that led to increased migration to Australia and changing public opinion and government policy, such as the publication of the mass murder of the Holocaust or the plight of refugees in war-ravaged Europe (Year 10). | Students are readied, prior to participating, to change their own narratives in response to forms of evidence they will see in the SJM. Shifting the perspectives of students (visitors in the museum context) to be more open to critiquing and interpreting source materials. |
| Clarify the validity of sources for supporting enough variety in historical perspectives (Popa, 2021; Seixas, 2016, p. 434). | Describing the causes of the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as the atrocities of the Holocaust, and the immense scale of destruction and displacement because of World War II (Year 10). | The exhibits and survivor testimonies are complemented by supplementary materials that make explicit connections between aspects of the museum and curriculum documents. The purpose of this exercise is to consolidate teaching and learning about history during Years 9 and 10 (14–16-year-olds) when the Holocaust is generally introduced in schools. |
In moving from left to right in Table 2 – from developing conceptual knowledge to practising skills – visitors to the museum are positioned by museum educators as part of negotiating their own version of Gadamer’s (1987) ‘full awareness of historicity of everything present’ (p. 89). At the SJM, they do so by engaging with material sources as silent witnesses of the past, as well as oral interactions with survivor testimonies (in-person and AI). Additionally, what is present in the exhibition represents a triangulation between the interest groups associated with the SJM and localised versions of historical consciousness that have been cultivated within the community surrounding the museum. Overall, this framework is one that is undergoing an intergenerational shift – whereby the localised particularity of the Holocaust is held in dialogue with universal concerns for human rights violations (Alba, 2024).
The implications of introducing interactive video testimonies at the SJM in 2022 are unclear in relation to how museum educators’ pedagogy might retain its focus on developing historical consciousness. At present, interactions with generative AIs – ranging from automated maps to chatbots, for example – mirror relationships with technology. AIs are largely positioned to receive data input to transact a desired output (Kelly et al., 2023), but users do not necessarily consider the digital architecture involved in this function. This schema renders the development of ‘orientations of internal [and] external lives’ that are part of Rüsen’s (2004, p. 72) typology problematic, particularly because AI is frequently described in terms of organic intelligence, which obfuscates its form (see for example, UNESCO, 2022). A probable consequence is that individuals who engage with these ‘virtual’ survivors may begin to comprehend personalised impacts of the Holocaust, but not necessarily be oriented towards adopting the moral value and moral reasoning elements of historical consciousness.
Due to these considerations, the significance of museum educators in making meaning during guided visits to the SJM is already shifting. At present, museum educators first provide a background to the digital architecture of the interactive video testimonies, giving an outline of types of questions to ask (in chronological order), before groups are allowed to develop their own lines of enquiry. This process is in many ways the reverse of current testimonies, where a survivor gives their account of witnessing the Holocaust in a personal narrative, which constitutes an act of reclaiming traumatic pasts (such as Greenspan et al., 2014; Ricoeur, 2004). Furthermore, the position of the museum educator needs to balance being a gatekeeper to the past with roles that feature andragogic and pedagogic relationships. In their analysis of interactive video testimonies at the National Holocaust Museum (UK), Marcus et al. (2022) suggested that the museum staff had a responsibility which encouraged the interpretation of the past based on sources and the survivors from within the museum. Such precautions would moderate against narratives propounded by other forms of digital sources, such as those from social media platforms and other sites where historical narratives are consumed (Bar-Gil, 2025).
Museum educators, therefore, play a crucial role in developing authentic historical empathy in a post-survivor era. They encourage visitors to make sense of traumatic experiences through fostering dialogue and healthy relationships (Adrien et al., 2024; Bhagani, 2017) and guard against the transference of fragmented narratives. A key element of this process is empathetic understanding, which underpins purposeful student engagement with Holocaust education. Empathy is a desirable outcome of the interactive video testimonies: a way to emotionally contextualise the cognitive elements that affect changes in attitudes and behaviours. For more engrained beliefs, including forms of discrimination and denial of the past, these testimonies could work together with museum educators over a longer term to provide sustained, immersive engagement (Bar-Gil, 2025). For school groups, this process might involve post-visit sequences of learning to consolidate their reflections about the SJM.
This hypothetical sketch therefore positions interactive video testimony as a connective tissue between the silent witnessing of the past by material objects in the SJM, the environment of the museum itself and the human elements of the visitors, volunteers and staff. These considerations are part of a younger generation in a genealogy of museum practice that allows for more participatory engagement by visitors within spaces (Ionescu and Mitroiu, 2023), which attempts to retain survivor testimonies at the core of how historical consciousness is developed as a result of visiting the SJM. The following sections of this article build on these trends in literature and practice among museum educators by unpacking how they view their own roles in facilitating the construction of visitors’ understandings, while allowing for their capacity to construct their own understandings that develop during each visit.
Methodology
Research site and Dimensions in Testimony
The SJM has origins as a survivor-funded and founded institution, where visitors could originally expect to be ‘guided’ in the museum by a Holocaust survivor. This institution serves as the predominant location for educating school students about the Holocaust and Jewish culture and religion in New South Wales, Australia. The SJM houses over 15,000 artefacts and 1,000 oral histories and testimonies. Annually, approximately 35,000 students engage in their educational programmes (SJM, 2024) and the museum is currently being redeveloped to reopen in 2027 in time for the implementation of a new history syllabus in New South Wales, where the Holocaust remains compulsory and is learned about as part of Australia’s involvement in the Second World War (New South Wales Education Standards Authority, 2024).
School visits to the SJM typically follow a three-hour programme, including a workshop with a museum educator, a thematic and age-appropriate tour of the museum with a volunteer guide, and Holocaust survivor testimony. Since museum educators moderate these latter parts of the tour, they are vital for survivors and students being able to safely navigate traumatic pasts and work to prevent intergenerational transference of trauma. This consideration, combined with learners being positioned to critically engage with the past, guides the chronologically structured approaches to delivering and witnessing testimony so it correlates with ‘safely in, safely out’ explorations of traumatic pasts (Bonardelli, 2016) and with the physical architecture of the SJM more broadly (Alba, 2015). The balanced curatorial ambition of the SJM is to ‘neither reassure [visitors with] an illusory vision of an unblemished Australian present nor [mire them] in the unmitigated darkness of the Nazi past’ (Alba, 2016, p. 256). As part of their witnessing experience, learners are thus positioned to critically engage with the past without being overwhelmed by incomprehensible trauma.
The key programme where AI is used to interactively preserve testimony at the SJM is DiT, where the SJM is the only institution in Australia housing this technology, as facilitated and supported by museum educators. Developed by the USC Shoah Foundation in 2014, DiT uses NLP AI (Stryker and Holdsworth, 2024) to maintain the interactive testimonies of six Holocaust survivors at the SJM. Typically, a consenting survivor is asked approximately a thousand questions regarding their experiences before, during and after the Holocaust (USC Shoah Foundation, n.d.). Once filmed, the responses are semantically matched to appropriate questions, taking slight variations on phrasing, language choice and question length into account. These specifications mean – ideally – that an individual can ask any question of the ‘survivor’ and receive an immediate response that conveys information accurate to the experiences that have been recorded. The DiT platform is thus designed to match responses to questions that visitors express, with a pre-existing repository from which nothing can be paraphrased or rewritten. At a word level, this approach ensures an ethical fidelity to interacting with survivor testimonies. While each response is authentically organic and recorded by the survivor, the training of the platform is reliant on curatorial decisions of which recording to play in response to which input (and subsequent semantic matches) (Boswell and Rowland, 2023).
Research design
This research assumes a pluralistic ontology, where interactions between individuals and groups as facilitated by language are seen as inherently social practices informed by diverse experiences and histories. In 2024, one-on-one interviews were held with eight SJM education staff, where the interview protocol designed by Marcus et al. (2022) in the UK’s National Holocaust Museum was contextually altered for use in this project. The application of Marcus et al.’s (2022) foundation to this data collection seeks to contribute to international dialogues on the application of AI to Holocaust survivor testimony in museum education contexts, where both research projects share many similarities. While the represented technologies may be aesthetically different (for example, in the UK’s Forever Project, virtual survivors are presented alongside selected personal artefacts using 3D technology, creating a virtual ‘avatar’ effect (Marcus et al., 2022; cf. Schultz, 2023)), the purpose is the same: to interactively preserve the experiences of Holocaust survivors in ways that allow individuals to ask questions and receive semantically matched responses. The instrument is also flexible and caters for participants who interacted with the design and curation of DiT at the SJM, as well as those with pedagogical experience.
The museum education staff interviewed represent diverse backgrounds, with both Jewish and non-Jewish participants, those with and without experience as classroom teachers and those in curatorial and historiographical roles. In the context of a one-hour, face-to-face audio-recorded and transcribed interview, educators were asked about their working background at the SJM, the broader motivations and context for implementing DiT at the SJM, goals for student and visitor use of the interactive video testimonies and personal implementation of the technology in their pedagogy. Their responses were anonymised post-interview in line with Human Research Ethics Committee guidelines.
A limitation of the approach to data collection as represented in this article is that learner perspectives are not provided, but are anecdotally referred to within the reflections of the museum educators. Given the value broadly placed on the role of ‘live’ survivors in educational experiences as the post-survivor era is increasingly realised, it is currently rare for DiT to be used as the sole point of access for students as they engage with survivor testimony at the SJM. Thus, when this data collection took place in 2024, students were almost exclusively interacting with ‘live’ survivors as part of their pre-booked museum tour, and it was not possible to study their engagements with – or perspectives on – DiT.
Analysis
A reflexive thematic analysis informed by Braun and Clarke (2022) was conducted with transcribed interview data to identify the pedagogical motivations and practices that the museum educators adopt to frame student experiences with DiT. This approach was undertaken to trace how work with interactive video testimonies is deemed to be effective. Coding and thematic development was largely informed by Hatch’s (2002) perspective of inductive processes in the pursuit of patterned meaning, where understanding is meaningfully generated by gathering specific pieces of evidence and drawing connections between them.
Semantic and latent approaches to coding were taken in discrete steps: first, explicit meaning was identified in the initial generation of themes; then the underlying ideas and ideologies that informed the conceptual shape of those themes were used to identify connections between different patterns that emerged in museum educators’ accounts. These trends were categorised from the transcripts of interviews into what pedagogical choices museum educators make when interacting with groups, the museum and the interactive video testimonies. The findings were documented in three categories, which reflect the structure of the next section: design and ethics, survivor biographies, and questions and chronology.
Results: museum educator interviews
This section involves a thematic analysis that explores three key structural factors of the museum educators’ pedagogical approach to facilitating interactive video testimony experiences. SJM educators appear to adopt a triarchic pedagogical approach where they explain DiT’s design and ethical frameworks, provide a brief survivor biography and facilitate student development and posing of questions to the virtual representation of that survivor. These steps work to engage visitors in exemplary forms of historical consciousness, with the survivor’s narrative being used as a stimulus to cultivate a critical form (Carroll, 2020; Rüsen, 2004). The educators also guide visitors’ engagement by making suggestions: interactive video testimonies are, for instance, more coherent and relevant when questions are asked in chronological order. Each factor will now be explored in turn.
Design and ethics
The testimony experience involves introducing students to how DiT was developed and implemented at the SJM. Anne carefully explains the processes of pre-recording, filming and post-production:
While the actual filming took a week, there were weeks and months of preparation involved. Pre-filming research and preparation involved extensive historical study to ensure accuracy across the pre-war, Holocaust, and post-war periods. This included identifying key themes, drafting, and categorising 1,500 questions to cover various aspects of their life, persecution, and post-war recovery. The questions were carefully crafted to be respectful and sensitive, particularly regarding traumatic experiences, and were reviewed by experts. Ethical considerations were paramount, with steps taken to ensure interviewees’ emotional well-being. Finally, pilot testing and interviewer training were conducted to refine the process and ensure the project’s success.
In all testimony contexts, museum educators work to move students from developing traditional historical consciousness that focuses on internal life, to exemplary forms that reconstitute historical knowledge in relation to survivors’ self-concept (Rüsen, 2004). This connection is part of creating a safe space where survivors can articulate the effects their experiences had on them and others, as well as visitors being readied by the museum educators so their own interpretations are developed in relation to the moral reasoning. Where Laura uses a metaphor for the experience of memory-sharing as akin to rubbing a cake of soap that gets progressively smaller, Mike actively workshops the ‘individuality of testimony’ and the roles of memory, age and perspective (see Felman and Laub, 1992, for a seminal perspective of testimony and ‘truth’). These concepts were foregrounded in the 2022–4 Reverberations exhibition, with DiT as a key feature, where Naomi suggests that audience understanding of the cost of testimony and their responsibility in the transactional experience was paramount. The exhibition provided visitors with the opportunity to view curated survivor responses to questions that consider ‘why do survivors choose to share their experiences?’, ‘is it difficult to talk about what happened to them?’, ‘can they forgive?’, ‘was there justice?’, ‘what is their responsibility to those who were murdered?’ (SJM, n.d.). Alongside these recorded ‘clips’ on a fixed loop, audiences could interact with the interactive video testimonies of three survivors: Eddie Jaku, Olga Horak and Yvonne Engelman.
Institutional integrity in the preservation of testimony is front of mind for all museum educators, who explicitly identify their ethical approaches in alignment with the USC Shoah Foundation’s (n.d.) aspirations. The training of the DiT platform for each survivor and their specially filmed testimony at the SJM involves an individual (such as a museum educator) semantically matching pre-selected responses in the form of ‘clips’ to the language of potential questions posed by future audiences. This selective process generates a concern discussed by Laura as she questions whether it is, thus, the survivor’s consciousness or that of the ‘trainer’ when responses are played to inquisitive audiences, particularly where there are multiple valid ‘clips’ available for a certain input (such as, when the topic is thematic or conceptual). Where recurring frequency also determines the responses played, the question is begged regarding the extraordinary number of responses in individual repositories and whether or not this can become redundant. The museum educator thus plays a crucial role in this challenge posed by machine learning, but there is a possibility that the survivor loses ‘say in the elevation of particular responses over others’, which risks diluting the ‘richness’ of the narrative down to ‘overdetermined highlights’ (Boswell and Rowland, 2023, p. 44).
The temporality of the interactive video testimony experience is separated from the consciousness of the ‘live’ survivor. With students, Daniel clarifies that the virtual survivors are not sentient, aligning DiT with the language-recognition functions of Siri, Alexa or Google Home due to pre- and misconceptions of AI and associated capabilities. This is a crucial point of difference between the testimony modes, where the virtual survivor lacks awareness of audience demographics and is unable to moderate responses in a generative fashion. Laura describes the requirement for museum educators to be prepared to navigate the ethical challenge of potentially disrupting a response that may be inappropriate for school-aged audiences:
When they were being filmed, they don’t know if what they’re saying is going to be used for children or for adults, so they’re just answering completely honestly. Whereas if someone, if [a survivor] is sitting in front of a group of year 6s, she’ll naturally talk differently … whereas behind the camera she doesn’t know. So oftentimes [the students will] ask a question about the camps… It will just be totally inappropriate. So sometimes I’ll cut it off when [the survivor] drop[s] their breath and [I’ll] say, ‘how interesting! There we go. So what about…’ I’ll unpack it a little bit because it’s too traumatic, and it’s not appropriate for kids, and they’ll have nightmares.
Survivor biographies
Before the opportunity is given for students to directly engage with DiT, brief biographies of the survivor and their experience anchor the co-construction and individual development of contextually appropriate and meaningful questions. In some cases, DiT allows survivors to share these biographies themselves in the form of three, five, or even 10-minute summaries (Ballis, 2022). SJM museum educators discuss this as a partial re-creation of engagement with traditional testimony where the survivor gives a detailed account of their experiences, then receives and addresses questions from their audience afterwards. Laura sees this as a potentially detrimental point of contrast between the testimony modes:
You really need to get the ball rolling. Whereas when [the survivor] is in the room [the students] might ask quite moving questions … and that being said, the question time happens after [the survivor] has already finished telling [their] story so they have a lot more of that knowledge that they could draw upon, but they tend to ask questions more along the nature of ‘what did it feel like to lose your father?’, or ‘what did it you feel like to do this?’, or ‘did you ever try and find this person who helped you all?’. Quite deep questions which you wouldn’t necessarily get if you ask them ‘would you ask a question to [survivor] on the DiT?’ They’re more likely to say ‘what was it like in Theresienstadt?’, ‘what kind of food did you eat?’, those sorts of historical questions.
The role of the museum educator in this context has thus shifted from one of support to guardianship, where they become content ‘specialists’ (Marcus et al., 2022) to ready students for engagement in a manner that is personalised for both the questioners and the virtually represented survivor. Given the lack of historical understanding in this context, where it is achieved by a traditional testimony (generally 40–50 minutes in duration), students can potentially ask less meaningful questions of the ‘virtual’ survivor, resulting in the data repository being accessed to elicit fragmentary and more general details (Boswell and Rowland, 2023). It should be stressed, however, that silence is not always perceived as disengagement by the museum educators; most of whom identified that non-verbal language such as facial expressions, eye contact, stillness and nodding can be just as indicative of empathetic engagement as the posing of thoughtful questions. Daniel also notices that students who are reluctant to ask questions may feel awe and reverence (Richardson, 2021) or concern for the emotional welfare of the survivor.
Nevertheless, being a language-processing system, the ‘aura’ that is attributed to a survivor is not as strongly conveyed by the interactive video testimony as it is in ‘live’ contexts. Both Laura and Daniel question if audiences being ‘amazed’ and ‘impressed’ by the experience is a result of the individualised narrative content or technological capabilities of DiT.
Questions and chronology
An essential element of interacting with virtual survivor testimonies is museum educators explicitly addressing how to ask questions that will elicit accurate responses. As the narrative content of the testimony is now guided by the audience, it is vital for students to understand the role played by language in this process. The NLP system is more effectively navigable via language specificity and brevity in questioning (Kubota-Hiramoto, 2018). When these technical nuances are explicitly deconstructed and supported by museum educators, the interaction is more accurate and engaging (Lycan and Artstein, 2019).
Mike explains to students that if an inaccurate response is provided, it is likely a reflection of the way the original question was asked during filming (‘you can ask the same question in ten different ways’). As much as the system is trained to be responsive to semantic variability, inaccuracies are noted and can be disappointing. Anne discusses the easy confusion of the platform when it is asked multiple or follow-up questions that are subsequently matched to ‘irrelevant or unrelated answer[s]’. Critique exists of this binary framework of call and response, as it hinders the subjectivity so prized in the field of oral history (Kubota-Hiramoto, 2018). At best, this can result in audiences appraising the interaction with a ‘passing curiosity’ (Boswell and Rowland, 2023, p. 41). It is a significant risk, however, that the audience disconnects, the experience may become gamified and empathy can be suppressed (Schultz, 2023). The latter is noticed by Charles, where students engage in a ‘game’ of accurate phrasing that ultimately renders them disinterested in the narrative content presented by survivors. Thus, given the design of DiT, there is a danger of audiences treating such testimonies as an archive to borrow from, with limited empathetic engagement (Marcus et al., 2022).
Generally, more critical and challenging questions are posed in interactive video testimony contexts (Marcus et al., 2022). The SJM museum educators notice the increased comfort and ‘bravery’ of students as they ask personal and emotionally charged questions of virtual survivors. In contrast to Laura’s earlier observations, for Daniel, these questions appear to abandon the search for easily accessible and collectively applicable facts in favour of individualised, emotive experiences:
[The questions] are more to do with ‘how did you feel about this?’, ‘how did you maintain faith?’, ‘how were you able to maintain morale?’, ‘how are you able to survive?’, as opposed to ‘how often did you do [this]?’ … ‘what type of food did you get?’ I guess the details of day-to-day camp life. I think they understand that … you’re not going to offend the technology.
Although she would have willingly answered the question in person, Corinne appreciates the confronting nature of asking a particular survivor about the tragic death of her mother. Conversely, this question is regularly asked of the survivor’s ‘virtual’ counterpart with ‘no problems’. The willingness of students to ask questions that they would previously have been uncomfortable to pose to ‘live’ survivors may reflect a perspective of interactive video testimony experiences that has both positive and negative implications. On one hand, student awareness of the technology having no inherent sentience paves the road for a more critical engagement with testimony as a uniquely situated historical source, inclusive of inaccuracies and subjectivity as determined by individual memory (Felman and Laub, 1992; Marcus et al., 2022). It also provides a safe environment in which students can explore their curiosity, as the data availability means that survivors gave their consent to answer such challenging questions at the time of filming. Conversely, students having the capacity to ask confronting questions can platform uncouth and inappropriate behaviour that perpetuates social disharmony.
The museum educators advocate for careful management of the testimony experience both in the presentation of graphic content and approaches to structured engagement. Being readily available online, it is recognised that the sophistication and design of DiT may lend itself to the misconception that educators do not need to prepare for effective student engagement. The premise of this advocacy is arguably supported by Gilbert and Hoepper’s (2011) articulation of learning as facilitated by the educator who has not ‘abdicated’ their position of providing ‘careful guidance’ (p. 205) to students in enquiry-based educational experiences.
It is well supported that while DiT can never truly replicate the experience of interacting with a Holocaust survivor, it is ‘the next best thing’ in a post-survivor world (Kubota-Hiramoto, 2018; Ma et al., 2015; Marcus et al., 2022; Traum et al., 2015). DiT’s high-quality filming techniques, interactive capabilities and access to a diverse and individually specific dataset contributes to a well-rounded representation of survivors. This authentic and personable reflection leads to continued active engagement with testimony where individual personalities remain accessible and impactful. For Anne, semantic accuracy increases the relevance of the experience, while Mike notices that meaningful interactions facilitated by NLP AI can continue to foster a ‘shared humanity’. Alex even suggests that students can lapse into ‘forgetting’ that they are not talking to a ‘real’ survivor. All perceptions relate to an element of connective potential (Boswell and Rowland, 2023) that is achieved when audiences suspend their disbelief of the reality of the experience. This phenomenon is partly realised by the affordances of the data repository, which Mike notes can facilitate interpersonal questions that extend beyond the horrors of the Holocaust, such as ‘what’s your favourite colour?; ‘what makes you happy?’. Rather than traditional audio-visual testimony which arguably remains focused on immediate pre-, during and post-war experiences, DiT acts as an interactive conduit for learners to access personable and relatable survivor narratives in perpetuity.
Frameworks are being established by SJM educators as they support continued student interaction with Holocaust survivors through individual testimony. Critical thinking and empathetic engagement have potential in the context of interactive video testimonies, but the semantic limitations of the NLP system can foster a disconnected experience. This can widen the empathy gap that may already exist given the significant temporal and cultural distance between students and the experiences under investigation. It is at this crucial intersection between museum educator practices and Holocaust representation (as informed by institutional frameworks) that historical consciousness should thus be considered.
Discussion
This section will now apply the theoretical framework of historical consciousness to the three pedagogical approaches identified in the previous results section. This consideration is significant for how museum educators can hone their practice to address survivors’ concerns: about the legacies that their testimonies will leave, visitors’ engagement with interactive video testimonies and the capacity for learning experiences to form connective memories that resonate as closely as possible to in-person testimonies about experiences of the Holocaust (for examples, in other contexts, see Bar-Gil, 2025; Stylianou, 2022; Walden, 2022).
Transitioning to genetic forms of historical consciousness
The application of NLP AI to filmed testimony represents an opportunity for educators to transition learners towards a more explicit engagement with genetic forms of historical consciousness. The multidirectional relationships between museum educators, testimony and students are thus vital to support such an engagement, particularly where ethically facilitated conversations are considered.
The pedagogical relationships between in-person survivors, museum educators and visitors are significantly geared towards navigating enquiry-based tensions. More explicitly, the role of the museum educator is to ensure that the disclosure of extreme experiences is comprehended and valued by visitors. The translation that Corinne and Laura describe – to ‘prevent nightmares’, as well as moderate the appropriateness of questions and answers – attempts to safeguard all participants against the transference of trauma and reframe the experiences in terms of resilience, loss and rebuilding (Kangisser-Cohen, 2014). These features shift the engagement with elements of historical consciousness into the moral reasoning elements of Rüsen’s (2004) typology. Laura in particular identified how inappropriate questions are motivated by curiosity. The museum educator’s pedagogical relationship during question-and-answer sessions is therefore positioned to make connections in moral reasoning, to role-model qualities of empathetic relationships as applicable in both live and interactive video testimony contexts. Daniel and Laura discussed an extreme example of an inappropriate question posed by a student to a ‘live’ survivor. In this case, the survivor was hard of hearing and required audience questions to be repeated (all educators mentioned this as a key role in their testimony facilitation). Laura explains her response to a student who asked a survivor (de-identified) ‘did you ever have to eat any human beings or faeces to survive?’:
I sort of looked at this kid and I looked at Bill and, Bill sitting there expectantly, waiting for me to repeat the question … I couldn’t say ‘that’s inappropriate’, because then the kid will feel bad, and I can’t humiliate the kid in front of his peers in that traumatic environment. So I sort of turned to Bill and I said, ‘so, Bill, in your desperation, did you ever have to eat anything really unpleasant to survive?’ … and he said, ‘oh, what do you mean?’ and I said, ‘did you eat anything other than the food that the guards gave you?’ and he said, ‘no, just what they gave us’. I was like, ‘there you go! So just what they gave.’ Question answered.
This decision-making process maintains the essence of the question relating to food and desperation, thus socially supporting the student and their pursuit for knowledge. More pointedly, this redirection supports the survivor in their return to traumatic mindscapes. In this case, Laura explicitly modelled how individuals can appropriately interact with survivors by establishing guidelines for how questioning can be respectful to the impact of traumatic experiences.
To translate these considerations to an interactive video testimony, there could be a shift in language according to the question needing to tap into the survivor’s film footage. Gunner Colnerud’s (2006) well-cited analysis of scholarship on teacher ethics specifies that lines of enquiry need to explicitly state criteria for ‘care and justice’ (p. 366). Considering the content that is preserved in virtual survivor testimonies at the SJM, the element of ‘care’ should guide the shared understanding of effective questioning so to elicit responses that adequately answer the visitors’ questions. Moral reasoning from Rüsen’s (2004) typology could be adapted to accommodate elements of the AI digital architecture, as a way of showing how it works as a conduit for memory as well as historical artefacts. Although Daniel reflected that visitors are ‘not going to offend the technology’, his ethical concern can be held in dialogue with Alex’s articulation that the medium causes people to forget they are ‘talking to a real survivor’; there is potential for an empathy disconnect when experiences of the Holocaust are translated from an embodied, humanised context into a virtual one. These shifts in approaches are necessary, therefore, so visitors can still empathise with the survivors’ experiences, and realise the value and limitations of AI, including how such AI features affect their interpretations.
What is consistent across these museum educator observations is – at the time of writing – visitors appearing to map their understanding of digital technology from other contexts onto how they work with interactive video testimonies in the SJM. More broadly, several studies have shown that human–AI interactions frame the technology as a tool in a cooperative relationship, while the human element provides guidance to adjust what any output will be (Mollick and Mollick, 2023; Walden, 2025). As such, a visitor’s interaction with the testimony of a virtual survivor may resemble a dialogue about history, but as Corinne notes about confronting questions being asked with ‘no problem’, this incongruity suggests that visitors interpret their experience as siloed in a museum, outside of other socio-cultural contexts, when in fact their questions (even co-constructed ones) draw on the individual and collective experiences of the group.
This gap suggests that there is a need for a more prominent focus on the genetic elements of Rüsen’s (2004) typology of historical consciousness, which might constitute a post-visit debriefing on learning points prior to leaving the SJM (such as by completing a reflection exercise and depositing it with the SJM; these might then be kept as a ‘thoughts depository’ that can prompt more reflections for future visitors). For school groups, the discussions might feature elements of closed-loop enquiry (to focus on core information that students need to know as part of their interactions) as well as establish parameters about what aspects of their dialogue with the interactive video testimonies can be more open in their lines of questioning.
Roles of humans and AI platforms
Considering Holocaust education as a ‘training ground for moral response’ (Barton and Levstik, 2004, p. 107), survivor testimony offers students the opportunity to engage with localised experiences in a bottom-up approach to history (Stylianou, 2022). When biographies are provided to shape interactions with testimony, survivors are often represented both as embodied warnings of democratic collapse and as role models of resilience and compassion for behavioural imitation in a pluralistic community. One significant consequence of DiT’s implementation is that more responsibility is placed on the user of the interactive video testimony to dialogically represent a conversation with a ‘live’ Holocaust survivor. The design principles of the USC Shoah Foundation, coupled with the triarchic approach currently adopted by the SJM, work to frame an understanding of the past where the survivors have been positioned to exercise agency over their traumatic experiences. In turn, the dialogue with the past is a means of reclaiming traumatic experiences in the form of empathetic engagement with a historical event to develop emotional proximity. Additionally, the dialogue accommodates the interpretation of human action (or inaction) via an analytical lens that involves deconstructing the types of narratives that feed into the construction of testimonies (Yeager and Foster, 2001). With the human–interactive video testimony dialogue, while the background knowledge is known for the latter, the former’s interactions are highly variable, resulting in a need for criteria about how socio-historical representation might desirably take place (following Parkes, 2013).
Rüsen’s (2004) typology designates a core element of historical consciousness as constituting ‘the past as a mirror of experience within which life in the present is reflected and its temporal features revealed’ (p. 67). An approach could therefore involve visitors undertaking exercises (guided by museum educators and curatorial staff, as appropriate) that involve moderating each account in relation to: (1) one another, (2) other institutions’ records, (3) still-living survivors, and (4) broader historical accounts and material evidence. This supports wholistic engagement within community-established interpretive frameworks as part of the museum’s larger narrative about both the Holocaust and socio-political cohesion.
When students actively contribute to a consistently accurate testimony experience, it is more likely that they can engage empathetically with the interpersonal capabilities of the technology. For example, the unique filming process has been designed to position audiences to feel that the survivor is directly talking to them (Stylianou, 2022). This production value could be complemented by museum educators’ pedagogical choices balancing student awareness of technological capabilities and limitations (thus fostering an accurate Q&A session), as well as engaging with the interactive video testimonies on an emotional level by asking interpersonal and subjective questions. Although this process involves a form of ‘forgetting’ (Alex) about the reality of the experience, it works to cultivate an appreciation of the past by the audience and, thus, supports a more authentically critical approach, where representations of the past are appropriately questioned and analysed (Rüsen, 2004).
Considering the experiences of educators at the SJM, it can be suggested that empathy gaps emerge between students and virtual representations of survivors in situations where structural and semantic misalignments are present. This experience was evident in the responses to students’ prompts when they were outside the parameters of the NLP systems that underpin the design of DiT, as well as when questions and comments were posed that were not placed in a chronological sequence or specific historical context. This experience may be perpetuated as the post-survivor era becomes fully realised and the already evident temporal separation becomes more challenging to bridge. To counter this, museum educators can capitalise on their unique access to relevant artefacts to provide another entry point for students as they develop connections to the survivor and the narrative content of their testimony. Arguably, this practice is already integrated in the UK context, where the design of the Forever Project includes represented objects significant to the survivor alongside their interactive testimony (Schultz, 2023). ‘Safely in, safely out’ philosophies can also be enhanced to account for the design and function of the interactive video testimonies (Bonardelli, 2016), where students appreciate the context of the technology and the experience of testifying survivors. Moreover, educators can implement structured frameworks that mirror (as closely as possible) traditionally available testimony experiences that are chronological and provide students with reference to data points from which to develop meaningful and appropriately worded questions. The explicit modelling and co-construction of questioning practices as led and supported by museum educators can also effectively address the empathy gap.
Maintaining authenticity
Testimony is understood as a cornerstone of Holocaust education where Australian students can, according to Anne, meet ‘a human being right there whose life has been deeply impacted, traumatised, and irrevocably altered in a negative way because of someone else’s bad choices and decisions’.
Currently, the presence of survivors and their testimonies in the SJM provide the means for shifting visitors’ historical consciousness about the past from traditional considerations of time, morality and historical significance, towards exemplary forms. As previously mentioned, discussions concerning the application of AI to preserve such interactions thus point towards a more critical engagement with the past (Rüsen, 2004), where the design of the platform leading to a temporal absence of the survivor encourages audiences to consider the subjective nuances and reliability of such sources.
Nevertheless, maintaining the desired authenticity to support continued traditional and exemplary engagement alongside critical analysis (Rüsen, 2004) with interactive video testimony experiences is challenging, and DiT is the recipient of both praise and criticism. The continued facilitation of testimony experiences with an interactive representation of survivors is novel and engaging (Altaratz and Morse, 2023) and the preservation of empathetic engagement is highly valued (Bender and Broderick, 2021). It also appears that audiences generally feel more comfortable posing critical and emotionally challenging questions which may not have been asked in the ‘live’ context for fear of upsetting survivors or causing distress (Marcus et al., 2022). Given the semantic requirements of the NLP system, however, limitations are identifiable where audiences ask ‘wordy’ or unspecific questions containing multiple key terms, leading to inaccurate or unexpected responses. When coupled with a lack of empathetic engagement in these situations, visitor interaction levels can remain low (Ballis, 2022), existing on a spectrum ranging from minor disinterest to more concerning expressions of anti-social and gamified behaviour (Schultz, 2023). There are also reported instances of semantic misalignment where audiences are the unintended recipients of graphic content when phrases are incorrectly ‘matched’. For example, Boswell and Rowland (2023) discuss the instance where a young student asked the virtual Pinchas Gutter if he had any ‘pets’, to which the NLP system selected a response pertaining to his ‘regrets’. The response, including disturbing content relayed by the visibly shaken survivor, was ‘sharply out of kilter both with their expectations and the overall atmosphere in the room’ (Boswell and Rowland, 2023, p. 48). Examples like this demonstrate the heightened responsibility of educators to maintain awareness of testimony content coupled with an understanding of the technological architecture, particularly with school-aged audiences.
Thus, challenges in authentic engagement with interactive video testimony stems from a cognitive mismatch between the ‘fabricated sense of being’ effectively achieved by lifelike, participatory design and the limitations of NLP AI (Stylianou, 2022, p. 119). This may prove counterintuitive in the maintenance of a traditional or exemplary historical consciousness (Rüsen, 2004), particularly if audiences approach the testimony experience in a piecemeal fashion. Several studies posit that this tends to result in disconnected experiences (Boswell and Rowland, 2023; Kubota-Hiramoto, 2018; Schultz, 2023; Verschure and Wierenga, 2022), which paves the way for disruptions to models of historical consciousness, as these are focused on unpacking the meaning generated from dialogic relationships between forms of knowledge, humans, other life forms and their environments (for a review of this, see Sammel, 2003). It is at this juncture between technological capability and audience understanding that museum educators (and history teachers, more broadly, as interactive video testimonies become increasingly available online) must adopt consistent pedagogical frameworks for authentic and effective interaction with platforms like DiT.
A key issue at the heart of the museum educator’s observations at the SJM echoes those expressed by individuals at other institutions: that survivors’ memories need to be preserved as part of the collective memory of the Holocaust in such a way that people can still interact and empathise with the survivors (Bar-Gil, 2025; Dressel, 2022). A secondary consideration is that Rüsen’s (2004) typology operates in relation to how meaning is made from the past at a personal level. A consequence for the introduction of interactive video testimonies is that the museum educators’ presence and guided instruction shape each visitors’ engagement with historical consciousness, in response to the exhibitions showing at the SJM. Therefore, a criteria that might be added to visitors’ surveys (and museum educators’ reflections) is how elements of historical consciousness are operationalised (following Popa, 2021). The potential opportunities that would be afforded for future research include delineating the effects of interactive video testimonies and other forms of AI on the development of historical consciousness. These might be accomplished by consulting forms of hybrid pedagogies that draw from both AI and humans (Nally, 2025). A third element is the museum space itself, which could be used as part of a multisensory framework developed by Luo et al. (2024) to clarify and shape emerging experiences by articulating the museum’s goals, maintaining a fidelity to the past and enabling visitors to develop historically accurate understandings about the experiences of survivors. In turn, the role of museum educators in relation to these testimonies could be more effectively tracked over time by developing exit surveys so there is a recognition of visitors’ learning, and what these professionals bring to learning individually and as a collective, from – and about – Holocaust survivor testimonies.
Conclusion
Survivor narratives are structured to safely foster student engagement with traumatic pasts that ultimately encourage the latter to actively apply ‘lessons’ to their lives and communities through survivors sharing key ‘messages’ and calls to action. At the SJM, educators navigate national and state curricular requirements, localised history and community aspirations in a context where antisemitic behaviour and political polarisation are increasingly visible just as survivors are becoming less accessible. For example, as compared to the 12 months preceding, Australia experienced a 316 per cent increase in antisemitic incidents between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024 (Nathan, 2024). On 14 December 2025, 15 people were murdered in an antisemitic attack on a Chanukah celebration at Bondi Beach. This tragedy representing, according to Alex Ryvchin (co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry), ‘a loss that is impossible to measure or articulate’ (Ryvchin, 2025), has resulted in educational institutions (including the SJM) reaffirming the vital roles played by Holocaust education and survivor testimony in the combatting of hate and fostering of tolerance (SJM, 2025).
Overwhelmingly, concerns for the future of Holocaust education can be found in the hopes for continued engagement with testimony (no matter the format) that encourage audiences to take action as a result of listening to the experiences of a Holocaust survivor. The museum educators, while supporting the use of DiT, all pondered what this future would look like without physically present survivors. Nevertheless, preserving the memory of the Holocaust beyond fixed means of expression (such as print literature) serves two purposes: first, as a key means of defence against historical revisionism or denial (Cubitt, 2007) and, second, to maintain a representation of survivors as like ‘us’ as possible: interactive, dynamic and interpersonal.
Where previously audiences of survivor testimony were situated as passive ‘onlookers … limited by the interpretive horizon’ (Parkes, 2013, p. 24) of the speaker and the institution; structured and active engagement with historical consciousness is an appropriate step forward into interactions with ‘virtual’ Holocaust survivor testimony (Boswell and Rowland, 2023, p. 38). Successful adoption of this framework in response to concerns for the authenticity and applicability of future experiences reflexively considers several factors. In the co-construction and educator modelling of appropriate questions, the keyword(s) should be appropriately interpreted by the NLP system. From this, the essence of the question ideally matches the essence of the response, which garners a contextually appropriate development of historical understanding in relation to individualised experiences and memories. An affective empathetic connection both with the virtual survivor and the events more broadly can be established, as supported by a cognitive empathetic engagement with the historical events that are narrated. The object-based support of the contents of the response, coupled with language specificity and brevity (Kubota-Hiramoto, 2018), can assist with the temporal resonance for current collective and individual experiences with the past. The responder, in their motivation to continue in their engagement with an interactive video testimony by asking further questions, should be metacognitively aware of appropriate language-sequencing practices, where the NLP system is unable to comprehend follow-up questions.
Educators adopting methods of facilitating historical consciousness within interactive video testimony experiences encourage students to consider oral histories as uniquely situated and subjective artefacts. As we move further into the post-survivor era, complementing these interactions with localised, object-based learning within institutional frameworks emphasising the particularity of the Holocaust for individuals, but also applying considerations for broader human rights violations, allows for meaningful experiences to be structured and co-created. As generalisable for educational contexts beyond museums and physical artefacts, rather than approaching interactive video testimonies in a piecemeal fashion, which disconnects the narrative content from an ecosystem of representational experience, students can critically appreciate both the naturally imperfect nature of testimony as a historical source and the NLP AI system being reliant on semantic accuracy. Thus, the experience (whether it be facilitated in a museum as supported by a museum educator or in a traditional classroom with DiT’s online availability) should not be viewed as a one-for-one ‘replacement’ for currently available interactions with Holocaust survivors and their testimony. Accounting for contextual and technological nuance as geared towards elements of care and moral engagement, interactions with interactive video testimony can prove effective and engaging into the future.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge and thank Professor Heather Sharp for her consistent support of our endeavours as early career researchers, and for her provision of constructive feedback at all stages of this research and publication.
Data and materials availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are stored on a password-protected computer but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, and so are not publicly available. These storage mechanisms are in line with Human Research Ethics Committee approval to conduct this research.
Declarations and conflicts of interest
Research ethics statement
The authors declare that the project was approved by the College of Human and Social Futures Human Ethics Advisory Panel of the University of Newcastle. Approval No. H-2024-0173.
Consent for publication statement
The authors declare that research participants’ informed consent to publication of findings – including photos, videos and any personal or identifiable information – was secured prior to publication.
Conflicts of interest statement
The authors declare no conflicts of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently anonymise the authors during peer review of this article have been made. The authors declare no further conflicts with this article.
AI statement
Not applicable to this article.
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