Paper short abstract:

The paper examines how AI is presented and negotiated in museums, analyzing 9 recent exhibitions in Germany. I describe curatorial efforts to counter prevailing AI narratives and reveal how these persist due to specific museum affordances and ecologies of visitor attention and participation.

Paper long abstract:

Until recently, artificial intelligence (AI) was primarily viewed as a tool for museums, and not as a subject of their work. In this paper I examine how AI is presented in museum exhibitions. Museums offer a set of affordances different from other media and actors involved in discussing AI (such as news media, policy documents, etc.). I studied nine cases of exhibitions on AI which were open in 2022-2023 in German museums. Several cases were a part of a permanent exhibition, other cases were developed as a temporary exhibition in a science and technology museum, history or art museum. For the analysis, I documented the exhibitions' design and content and conducted interviews with curatorial teams to elucidate the approaches museums employ and to reveal which objects and media are used to demonstrate and explain AI to the public. The analysis showed that curators are aware of existing perceptions of AI and largely critical of dominant narratives of AI technology. They seek to contest AI myths and present a nuanced and realistic picture. Despite this, mainstream images of AI and elements of dominant narratives are still being reproduced. In the paper, I explain how this is contingent on the specific materialities of museum exhibition, the need to introduce interactive and recognizable objects, and overall ecology of visitor attention and participation. In conclusion, I comment on the ways in which bringing the topic of AI into the museum transforms and destabilizes the practices of museum work.