Nearly Everyone Is Concerned About How Museums Use AI in Exhibitions, Survey Says

A new survey suggests that the broad majority of US museum visitors are worried about how AI is used in the production of exhibitions and marketing materials, mirroring an anxiety about AI that proliferates widely today.

The American Alliance of Museums’ 2026 survey showed that just 9 percent of respondents accepted the use of AI in museum shows. Nineteen percent were unbothered by the notion that AI could used for brainstorming but not exhibition texts, meanwhile, and 29 percent said they felt no reservations about the usage of AI to write emails sent by museum officials.

Forty-three percent of respondents said they expected humans to “develop all content from museums, including exhibitions, emails…everything.”

AI is not yet widely used to produce exhibitions. But a New York Times report from this past weekend revealed that a handful of forthcoming shows will incorporate it, though not always in the form of wall texts. For one, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art will involve AI in a VR recreation of James McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room for its version of a Tate-organized retrospective for the artist.

The AAM survey also addressed the issue of museum attendance, a perennial concern since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, which limited visitorship to such a degree that many institutions have still struggled to bounce back. The survey did not explicitly tackle the amount of visitors each institution receives annually, but it did suggest a new problem in its place: the issue of repeat visitation.

“In the six years since the pandemic began, this repeat visitation has leveled off into a lower ‘new normal’ that seems to reflect enduring changes in behavior,” the survey said. “In other words, it’s not whether people are visiting museums that’s causing attendance shortfalls; it’s how often.”

In more positive terms, the survey noted that, where museums previously saw their audience “to be whiter, older, and more educated than Americans on average,” now there are signs this is changing.

Per the survey, “only 47 percent [of museum visitors] hold a college degree, only 35 percent are white (not Hispanic or Latine), and only 26 percent are 60 or older. In fact, white respondents are the most likely to report ‘never’ visiting museums (while Asians and Asian Americans are the most likely to report visiting), and adults over 60 are the least likely of any age/life stage group to have visited in the past year (while parents or guardians of minor children are the most likely).”

And the public appears to want to museums to remain inclusive, even as the current Trump administration seeks to change that. “While younger people and liberals show the most inclusive attitudes, the majority of all age segments and the majority of conservatives still fall on the side of inclusion,” the AAM survey said.