Fire Your Chatbot, Pay Your Writers: The Art World’s AI Excuse Is Wearing Thin

The wall text at a major museum is the most-read writing in the city that nobody gets credit for. You stand there with a tote bag and a half-charged phone, and a few sentences tell you what to feel about a painting. Someone wrote those sentences. Someone was paid to. If the institutions with the nicest lobbies in New York have decided that someone is now optional, they should say so plainly, and they should be embarrassed.

That is the argument a Hyperallergic editor made this week, and I’ll go further than she did. Well-resourced museums and cultural organizations have no excuse for using generative AI in place of paid writers. None. Not a shrinking budget, not a deadline, not a vague appeal to efficiency. The excuse people keep reaching for is the one that works on a spreadsheet and collapses in a gallery.

Here is the context, and it isn’t complicated. The cultural sector has leaned on freelance writers for as long as anyone can remember. Catalog essays, wall labels, exhibition copy, press materials, member emails. It was never lavish work. Rates have been a running joke between writers for years, the kind of joke you tell at an opening over a plastic cup of wine because the alternative is crying into it. But the work existed, and it paid something, and it trained a generation of critics and curators who learned to look hard and say true things in tight space.

Now arrives a tool that produces fluent, confident, empty paragraphs in four seconds. And the institutions that have galas, endowments, naming rights and capital campaigns look at it and see savings. Think about that. The Whitney just opened a 130-work Lichtenstein retrospective, the first in the city since 1993, with outdoor installations and the full weight of a major institution behind it. A show like that is an enormous act of looking, argued in prose, and the prose is part of the product. Nobody is asking whether a machine should explain why a Pop artist who borrowed from comic strips still matters. But somebody, somewhere in a development office, is asking what it would cost to stop paying people to do it.

The irony is almost too neat. Pop art spent decades poking at the line between the handmade and the manufactured. Lichtenstein painted Ben-Day dots by hand to look like they came off a press. The whole joke was that a human being worked very hard to look like a machine. Now institutions are running the joke in reverse, asking machines to imitate human voice, and the punchline is that the humans lose their rent money.

And don’t let anyone tell you the difference is invisible. It isn’t. AI copy has a flavor, a kind of damp beige agreeableness, a habit of saying that an artist explores themes without ever saying which themes or why you should care. It cannot stand in front of the work. It has never been bored in a gallery on a Tuesday. It cannot tell you the thing about the painting that you walked past twice without noticing. An institution whose entire reason to exist is sustained attention to human making is outsourcing its sentences to something that has paid attention to nothing.

I keep thinking about a freelancer I’ll leave unnamed, a composite of several you could meet at any opening below 14th Street. Thirty-something, three part-time gigs, a MetroCard she refills in twenty-dollar increments, a drawer of catalog essays she is proud of. She is not asking for a miracle. She is asking not to be replaced by a subscription tier. Meanwhile her would-be clients are announcing new wings.

The defense will be that AI is just a drafting aid, that a human editor will always clean it up. Fine. Then say that, publish the policy, and pay the editors and writers who remain a living wage for the extra scrutiny. What you cannot do is let the quiet substitution happen and hope no one checks the byline. Transparency is the minimum. Anything less is a bet that visitors are too polite to notice.

So here is the demand, and it is concrete. Every museum, gallery and nonprofit arts organization in this city that takes public money or tax-exempt status should publish a plain statement of whether it uses generative AI to produce public-facing writing, and commit to paying human writers for wall text, catalog essays and exhibition copy. Boards should vote on it. Directors should sign it. Funders should ask for it in the next grant cycle.

If these places can raise millions for a lobby renovation, they can afford a paragraph written by a person. And if they can’t be bothered, someone should ask them, loudly, at the next opening: what exactly are you trying to say, and who, exactly, is saying it?

— Made in NYC Editorial Desk · News (AI-assisted) · Columnist