Ending my brief deadline-and-illness-induced hiatus because the British Museum is mired in yet another public scandal.

A couple of days ago, the British Museum’s official account posted a number of AI-generated slop images, seemingly to promote their recently-opened exhibition Hawai’i: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans. These images have since been scrubbed from the internet, apparently now viewable only in the videos posted by creators (rightly) calling them out.

The British Museum has offered no statement nor explanation for this embarrassing display of techno-fascist capitulation, but I would like to perhaps briefly offer my own.

In my most recent piece, The Night of the Museum, I argued that the British Museum is essentially in a moment of uncertainty. It refuses to meet the present moment with a real reckoning of what its role as a public, cultural institution and protector of human history and heritage is. I analysed this in light of its recent BBC-collab Civilisations programme, but I think that the same lessons are relevant to this new, bubbling AI-marketing scandal.

The British Museum wants to be the repository of the human past, and the ultimate arbiter making decisions on how to preserve that past, and yet it refuses to offer, or is simply unable to offer, real solutions for the crises of the present moment. It cannot create a compelling, imaginative vision of the future because it is undergirded and bound by paradigms of colonial erasure and decontextualisation, of theft, violence, slavery, and cultural and environmental denigration, and it refuses to acknowledge these in a tangible, meaningful way.

Therefore, we should not be surprised that the British Museum blindly used AI ‘art’ in lieu of employing an actual artist (perhaps even, I don’t know, an artist from Hawai’i?) to help promote their exhibition, because the British Museum is unable and unwilling to reconcile with its past. Thus, it cannot engage with its, or our, future.

Their use of AI is another manifestation of the same impulse that fundamentally shapes Civilisations: a desire to control the narrative and sanitise the tricky, problematic, and deeply human questions that emerge when we think about what the role of the contemporary museum is, or should be.