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AI in Service of Art, Learning, and Accessibility
Our Approach to Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is impacting how people create, learn, communicate, and access information. While these technologies raise important questions and concerns, the CMA believes cultural institutions have a responsibility to engage thoughtfully with AI rather than ignore it. Our goal is to help shape how AI is used in ways that expand access to art, support the work of museum professionals, and uphold the rights and contributions of artists and creators, while honoring the creativity, scholarship, and lived experience that define the museum. AI is not a replacement for human expertise; rather, it is one of many technologies we use in the service of art, audiences, and learning.
The following descriptions explain how and why the museum uses AI, the principles that guide its deployment, and the safeguards we put in place to protect artists, visitors, and our community.
How the CMA Uses AI
The CMA views AI as a tool that can empower staff to focus their talent where it can make the biggest impact. By supporting tasks ranging from research, analysis, and content development to accessibility, discovery, and other operational functions, AI can help create more capacity for creativity, scholarship, strategic thinking, collaboration, and meaningful engagement with audiences—areas where human expertise, creativity, and judgement remain irreplaceable. The CMA explores and applies AI in carefully defined ways that support our public mission, including the following:
- Improving access to collections through discovery tools, multilingual support, and assistive technologies that help more people engage with art. In the spring of 2026, we enhanced accessibility to the CMA’s Collection Online with the addition of AI-generated visual descriptions for every object in the collection. The translation of our artworks’ key visual elements into these descriptions provides visitors who are blind or have low vision increased access to experience and engage with each work.
- Enhancing interpretation and learning, such as experimental interfaces that help visitors ask new kinds of questions about artworks or explore connections across cultures and time periods. Introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, ArtLens AI: Share Your View enables community members to connect with art in new ways by matching their own images to collection pieces with similar characteristics. During the winter 2025 exhibition, Renaissance to Runway: The Enduring Italian Houses, artists specializing in using AI as their medium brought to life rare garments that are otherwise too delicate to wear, leveraging environmentally sustainable computing resources housed on-site.
- Supporting museum operations in low‑risk, efficiency‑focused areas, always with human oversight, such as providing documentation on internal processes.
Making Art Accessible to All
The CMA wrote visual descriptions for the primary images of all 68,000+ objects in its collection, to be used both online and on-site. Explore any artwork on Collection Online and open its visual description modal to take a look.
Exploration and Experimentation
As part of our role as a research and educational institution, the CMA supports limited, carefully controlled experimentation with emerging AI technologies. Exploratory projects are designed for learning and evaluation, do not rely on sensitive data, and are not deployed publicly without human review and approval.
This approach allows the museum to better understand new tools, ask critical questions, and contribute to broader conversations about technology and culture. Read about our ArtLens Reimagined exhibition to learn about a recent project that uses AI to invite curiosity and create new pathways into the collection, while preserving the human elements at the center of the museum experience.
Human Review Principles
All AI‑assisted work at the CMA is guided, reviewed, and approved by museum staff. Curators, educators, conservators, technologists, and researchers remain accountable for the accuracy, tone, and intent of all public‑facing content.
AI may assist with research, drafting, organization, or experimentation, but final decisions, especially those presented to visitors, are made by people.
Transparency with Our Audiences
The CMA is committed to being open about when AI is used for generating content that is displayed publicly. Any content displayed to the public that is generated or materially modified using AI, is clearly labeled accordingly.
We believe transparency builds trust and helps contextualize for visitors how AI enhances, without significantly changing, the visitor experience.
Ethical and Responsible Use
As a cultural leader, the CMA believes audiences expect museums not only to adopt new technologies thoughtfully but also to help establish standards that protect artists, respect intellectual property, and preserve the value of human creativity. Our use of AI is governed by an internal institutional policy that emphasizes the following:
- Alignment with the CMA’s mission and values
- Respect for artists, cultures, and intellectual property
- Avoidance of harmful bias or misrepresentation
- Human review for all public‑facing outputs
- Clear accountability for decisions influenced by AI
The CMA does not allow AI systems to make unsupervised decisions that affect individuals and we actively test and evaluate systems to mitigate bias and unintended consequences. We view AI to be a tool that must be wielded responsibly, which can be used creatively, but must not diminish artistic authenticity.
Protecting Data, Rights, and Privacy
The CMA takes data protection seriously. We do not share confidential, proprietary, or sensitive information with public AI tools, and we carefully evaluate vendors and systems before approving AI technologies for use.
Images of artworks and other copyrighted materials are handled with particular care, and AI systems are not permitted to retain or train on protected content.
AI Collection Tool Sets
ArtLens Reimagined: The Intersection of Art, Technology, and Innovation
Experience the third and most innovative iteration of ArtLens Gallery. Immersive and inclusive interactives are designed to remove the intimidation of an art museum and give people the tool sets to look closer and dive deeper.
Using AI in ArtLens Gallery
In ArtLens Reimagined we are leveraging advancements in AI technology to make art meaningful and impactful in new ways. AI has been used at the CMA since 2012 as a thoughtful, mission‑aligned tool to enhance access, understanding, and engagement, while honoring the creativity, scholarship, and lived experiences that define the museum. AI is not a replacement for human expertise; rather, it is one of many technologies we use in service of art, audiences, and learning. We endeavor to use AI for inviting curiosity and creating new pathways into the collection, while preserving the human elements at the center of the museum experience.
ArtLens Interactives Using AI
Art in Arms Reach: AI tracks the distance between your hands, allowing you to discover what artwork would fit between them to explore the collection at its true scale.
Strike a Pose and Hand Model: These interactives match your poses and hand positions to artworks in the collection, using real-time gesture and body tracking.
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Art Morph: Transform everyday materials into artworks inspired by the open access collection. Generative AI trained exclusively on select public domain artworks in the collection dynamically creates new compositions as you rearrange the items.
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Talk to the Art: Multiple AI tools combine to transcribe your questions, interpret, and generate responses to have a conversation with an artwork.
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What Does Art Sound Like?: We initially used AI to generate visual descriptions and content used in these two interactives. As part of the content editing process, each description underwent a thorough curatorial review and was revised to ensure accuracy.
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Community Mural: Make a collaborative mural by digitally collaging open access artworks. AI can help to quickly cut out specific elements of an artwork (e.g., plants, hats, people), so your creativity can flow freely with less time spent making complex cuts.
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Infinite Landscape and You on View
The immersive Infinite Landscape seamlessly stitches together a series of paintings using AI to fill in the visual gaps between artworks, imagining what could exist beyond each frame and connecting them into one continuous scene.
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All AI models run locally within the museum, allowing the CMA to maintain control over computing power, data use, and reliability. Models are trained specifically on the CMA artworks, avoiding the use of external training material that may not have been ethically sourced. This approach ensures responsible AI use while creating meaningful interpretive experiences.
Looking Forward
AI is a rapidly evolving field, and the CMA’s approach continues to adapt as technologies, standards, and public expectations change. We believe museums have a responsibility not only to adapt to emerging technologies but to help shape how they are used ethically, creatively, and in service of the public. We see this work as an ongoing dialogue, internally among staff and externally with artists, scholars, peers, and the public.
By using AI deliberately, transparently, and responsibly, the Cleveland Museum of Art aims to expand access to its collection while remaining firmly committed to artists, scholarship, audience trust, and the art and culture that museums exist to celebrate.
Contact Us
If you have additional questions that are not answered on this page, please contact artlens@clevelandart.org.
Please note that we currently do not use AI for translation purposes. As we continue to explore new ways to make art more accessible, we will update this page with information about how we use AI.