Ethnographic museums are undergoing profound rethinking to overcome colonial legacies through participatory practices, multi-vocal narratives, restoration of cultural agency to originating communities. Simultaneously, AI introduces ethical complexities, intersecting with decolonization processes, still underexplored by literature. As museums attempt transforming from “colonial” institutions into shared heritage stewardship spaces, AI introduction raises fundamental questions: who should design technological tools representing communities often excluded from institutional decision-making? How can AI contribute to (or hinder) efforts restoring cultural agency to originating communities?
AI decolonization has become urgent as current systems reflect values from predominantly white, male, patriarchal development environments while systematically excluding non-Western knowledge from training data. For Indigenous communities, this exclusion means their traditional knowledge (TK) is misrepresented or completely absent from AI models, perpetuating centuries of cultural erasure in digital form. In museum contexts, these technological limitations become particularly problematic as AI tools intended to enhance cultural representation instead reinforce existing biases, creating barriers rather than opportunities for the decolonial transformation.
Recently, human-centered AI has gained prominence in museum applications, emphasizing human data annotation over automated processes. However, humans introduce cultural stereotypes and biases into tagged data, while this annotation work is predominantly performed at extremely low wages by populations from formerly colonized countries, perpetuating exploitative colonial economic relationships in digital form. AI decolonization movements include researchers de-centering Western norms and communities developing decolonial alternatives, such as the Indigenous Protocol, exploring how Indigenous epistemologies can contribute to AI development.
Through the analysis of case studies of contemporary Indigenous artists using AI and experiments with GenerativeAI conducted by the authors, this contribution will examine how artistic practices can contribute to decolonial approaches while revealing how AI systems perpetuate biases against TK. The objective is stimulating discussion on the risks/opportunities that AI presents for ethnographic museums redefining their socio-cultural role toward more ethical paradigms.