Yoav,
The phrasing and tone that you note that your AI lacks is not necessarily some innate human trait, but rather the result of a great deal of education and practice.
Every piece of writing that museums publish is more than merely a selection of facts boiled down into a set of sentences. Each of those writings contains not just facts but theories of how people learn, and the average reading age of your visitor group, and what 'common knowledge' means to the community in the context of the exhibition, and even best practices on how to start a sentence in this style of writing, how to choose what you focus on and what perspectives you elevate.
Writing museum texts, particularly exhibition texts, is one of the most difficult aspects of exhibition development. Synthesizing complex topics and narratives into a limited word count that manages to convey the message, remain accessible to the widest array of visitors possible while not appearing to condescend or assume ignorance, and still sound interesting enough to keep a museum-goer's attention is extremely difficult and specialized. It's also something that most LLMs likely lack representation of in their databases, as most museums don't digitally publish their texts and guides.
Your LLM can't sound like a curator or an educator because it hasn't been trained in the ways that museum practitioners are. A digital library of human-created text run through algorithms can't replace expertise and craft.
You've asked us where the line is, and you've asked us whether our institutional tone is worth more than the convenience of having a machine write some sentences. Maybe as an AI CEO you don't see this, but you're asking the museum field to sign off on outsourcing our Curators and Educators, our colleagues and even ourselves.
I would hope that for most if not all of us, the 'line' is being asked to accept that AI in museums won't serve as assistants, but replacements.
It is, perhaps, acceptable to develop specialized, locally-hosted tools that may someday be good enough to help with transcriptions and digitization, it's another to expect a machine filled with the entirety of the internet (stolen knowledge!) to somehow be sensitive, careful, and take into consideration the violent colonial history of the museum field that we as humans are still struggling to reckon with.
For myself, I don't see how I, as a museum practitioner, can be serious about working towards decolonization and reparations while blithely using a tool built in the same colonial method as our predecessors built the museums - by stealing knowledge and patrimony from their origin communities without so much as a "please", let alone consent, compensation, collaboration, the ability to place conditions on usage, etc.
If we replace our curators and educators with AI even in this one area, do we then begin to reduce ourselves to buildings full of objects divorced from context? This is a slippery slope, and I firmly believe that as we bear the duty of care for our collections and our communities, that must include protecting them from the tech world's push to dehumanize our cultural institutions. We aren't corporations, and I wish the AI world would stop treating us like a productivity problem to be solved.
I would never accept an AI guide, and if presented with one at a museum I would lose a great deal of respect for that institution.
A final word of warning to the field: studies have been performed on the reactions of the public to being presented with objects they think are real, but are later revealed to be duplicates/models. The reactions are uniformly negative - it is a betrayal of trust. If you feel you must use AI, cite it. If you don't, you run the risk of eroding public trust in your institution and eventually in museums as a whole.
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Anna Fowler
Data Manager
Bell Museum - University of Minnesota
Saint Paul MN
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Original Message:
Sent: 02-25-2026 08:37 AM
From: Yoav Cohen
Subject: Flexibility of AI Guides vs. Museum Tone and Phrasing
Hi AAM community,
I'm developing an AI tour guide and thinking about what I call the "Museum Tone and Phrasing Gap." Even when the information is correct, AI doesn't naturally sound like your curators or educators.
So where's the line for you?
Would you accept an AI guide, one that could deliver accurate information and respond to visitors in real time - even if it doesn't fully reflect your institutional voice?
Or is your museum's voice so central that AI shouldn't represent the collection at all?
Thanks for your thoughts,
Yoav
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Yoav Cohen
CEO Tema Creative
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Yoav Cohen
CEO
Tema Creative
London
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