The British Museum has shared images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) on its Instagram account and then deleted them after facing backlash.
Stephanie Black, an archaeologist and PhD candidate at Durham University, shared screenshots of AI-generated images on the British Museum’s Instagram account, portraying a female visitor looking at artefacts.
In the series of images, the “visitor” is dressed in what appears to be traditional East Asian and Mexican attire, observing exhibits from these countries.
The images were linked to Instagram accounts of V8 Global, an AI marketing studio, and an apparent AI model, Elly Lin, whose most recent posts resemble a trip across Europe.
“And yes, it is that serious when one of the biggest cultural institutions in the country posts AI slop instead of inviting actual living members of communities to wear their cultural clothing in the galleries,” Black wrote in her Instagram post.
Louise Bedford, an archaeologist and heritage communicator, says she asked the Museum what happened in its social media comment section, as she was genuinely worried about the potential hack. This resulted in her being unfollowed.
Bedford called AI imagery “ethically messy,” especially in the arts and heritage context.
“You would think they would avoid messy ethics, considering their reputation with ‘stolen or contested’ artefacts,” she wrote on her Instagram.
The British Museum is recognized as the world’s first national public museum and houses over eight million artefacts. The museum has long been criticized for unethical acquisitions of its collection during the period of the British Empire.
The museum acknowledges that the way some objects were acquired is “no longer current or acceptable,” but didn’t fulfill the requests of countries like Egypt and Greece to return the artefacts.
In the British Museum’s statement to ArtNews, it said that it regularly shares “user-generated” content online, and in this case, an AI-generated image.
“We do not post AI-created images and, recognizing the potential sensitivity, removed it,” the museum said, adding that it is in a process of creating museum-wide guidelines on AI use.
AI is becoming more common in museums
Mya Steele, an architectural and political historian, wrote that AI is becoming increasingly prevalent in museums and other historical settings, calling it “ethically unacceptable.”
She warned that as AI routinely produces factual errors, fabricated quotes, and cultural bias, this raises the risk of visitor misinformation, “damaging institutional credibility and distorting public knowledge.”
Steele says AI models were trained predominantly on datasets shaped by colonial narratives and limited or biased historical interpretations.
As a result, AI tends to reproduce Eurocentric narratives, erase marginalized voices, and perpetuate insensitive or inappropriate interpretations of cultural material, Steele argues.
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