The Real Impact of AI on Art and Culture
Read this article in French:
Vous utilisez déjà l’intelligence artificielle
An everyday moment:
You log on.
You are looking for something to read. You ask a search engine a question. A streaming platform recommends a film. An artificial intelligence suggests new cultural discoveries.
A few seconds later, it feels as though you have simply found what you were looking for.
Yet something important has just happened…
You have encountered culture in a way that is very different from how your parents or grandparents did.
For centuries, we have discovered culture and knowledge through mediators: a library, a bookseller, a teacher, a critic… or simply a friend.
Like many people of my generation, I spent years discovering culture exclusively through human mediators.
Today, new mediators have joined this long history… and they are no longer human.
Who now guides our cultural discoveries?
Global culture has become a continuous flow in motion.
Works of art, books, films, articles and ideas no longer circulate only through libraries, booksellers, critics and cultural institutions.
They now move through a vast network where search engines, digital platforms and artificial intelligence also help shape their circulation.
In reality, we have already been accompanied for decades by new mediators that quietly organize part of our encounters with culture.
Whether we realize it or not, we already use artificial intelligence when we search the Internet, watch a video on YouTube, receive a recommendation for a film, a song, a book or an article, or simply when social media platforms decide what appears in our news feeds.
The greatest impact of artificial intelligence is not its ability to create images, texts or music. Its greatest impact lies in its role as a mediator, helping shape our cultural discoveries and the circulation of works, ideas and knowledge.
The mediators are changing. Increasingly, they take the form of search engines, digital platforms and artificial intelligence.
Our desire to discover, share and pass on culture, however, remains profoundly human.
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This text is part of the series Understanding Today’s Culture, a chronicle of global networked culture.
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Further Reading
🟦 The Use of AI in Art: Beyond Creation – Algorithms That Organize Global Culture
🟦 You Already Choose Your Culture
🟦 You Publish… But Are You Really Seen?
🟦 Global Culture as a Moving Mosaic
🟦 Understanding Today’s Culture – View All Micro-Essays
© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor
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