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.
A Technology Already Integrated into Everyday Life
Since the arrival of conversational AI systems such as ChatGPT, many people have the impression that artificial intelligence has suddenly entered our lives. Yet different forms of AI have already been present in our daily lives for many years.
We use AI when we search the Internet, follow a GPS route, when streaming platforms suggest films or music, or when social networks automatically organize the posts that appear in our news feeds. Online shopping platforms, voice assistants, automatic translation, recommendation systems, editing tools, and even many health applications already rely on forms of artificial intelligence.
AI is no longer a technology of the future. It has gradually become an invisible infrastructure of contemporary everyday life.
A Gradual Evolution of the Web and Digital Platforms
I have been observing the evolution of the web and digital culture since the early days of the Internet in the 1990s. I witnessed the emergence of the first search engines, the beginnings of social networks, digital platforms and, gradually, the arrival of algorithmic systems that now organize a large part of global cultural circulation.
This shift did not happen suddenly. It developed slowly, almost silently, until it became an integrated part of contemporary daily life.
Today, this reality affects almost every area of society: work, education, communications, media, commerce, transportation, health, research, culture and the arts.
It is already changing the way many professions function on a daily basis. Teachers use writing and research assistance tools, cultural workers depend on digital platforms to distribute their content, companies automate certain administrative tasks, and creators use recommendation systems to reach their audiences.
Media, Journalism and Culture in the Algorithmic Environment
Even professions related to information, communication and media are now evolving within this digital environment where platforms, search engines and algorithmic systems occupy an increasingly important place.
We can also see this in journalism, where journalists already use writing assistance tools, automatic transcription systems, intelligent search engines and platforms that personalize the circulation of information. In newsrooms, algorithms now influence content visibility, the speed of dissemination and sometimes even the way topics reach the public.
Art and culture do not evolve outside the contemporary world. They are transforming within the same digital and algorithmic environment that is already reshaping our daily habits.
Today, digital platforms play a major role in our cultural experience. Recommendation systems help organize what we discover, watch, listen to and share. Search engines also influence the visibility of artworks, artists, articles and ideas.
The deepest role of AI may not simply be to produce images, texts or music. It also lies in its ability to silently organize global cultural circulation.
Visibility in Algorithmic Culture
We are already living in an algorithmic culture.
This does not mean that algorithms completely control our lives or that humanity is disappearing. But it does mean that many aspects of our experience of the world now pass through systems of calculation, recommendation, filtering and personalization.
This presence sometimes becomes almost invisible because it gradually integrates itself into our habits. Like the Internet before it, AI is slowly ceasing to be perceived as a spectacular novelty and is becoming a normalized everyday environment.
We may be entering a period comparable to the post-digital era: a moment when technology ceases to be exceptional because it has already become part of the ordinary cultural landscape.
For younger generations, digital platforms, automated recommendations and algorithmic systems no longer represent a technological novelty, but simply a normal part of the cultural environment in which they are growing up.
Today, even people who claim to distrust artificial intelligence often use, sometimes without fully realizing it, platforms, search engines, social networks and digital systems that already rely on various forms of algorithms and AI.
It is possible to reject certain uses of conversational AI or to question its development. But it becomes more difficult to claim that we live completely outside these technological environments, since digital platforms and algorithmic systems are now an integral part of contemporary everyday life.
This situation nevertheless raises several important questions. Algorithmic systems sometimes tend to favor content that generates rapid attention, strong emotional reactions or constant engagement. Personalized recommendations can also reduce certain forms of spontaneous discovery and encourage a gradual homogenization of cultural tastes.
In this context, visibility itself becomes a major cultural issue.
What is not recommended circulates less. What circulates less sometimes becomes almost invisible.
Artists, writers, journalists, creators and cultural organizations must now evolve within environments where the circulation of content increasingly depends on digital platforms and algorithmic systems.
Human Presence in an Automated World
But this transformation is not only about technology. It also concerns the way we inhabit the contemporary world.
As systems become more automatic, more fluid and more integrated into everyday life, certain human dimensions seem to acquire a new value: real presence, attention, slowness (human time), critical thinking, human relationships, emotion, memory and lived experience.
Algorithmic systems did not appear on their own. They also reflect the choices, values and orientations of the societies that develop them.
The more algorithmic the world becomes, the more precious human presence becomes.
Artificial intelligence will probably continue to profoundly transform contemporary societies. The arts, media and culture will also continue to evolve within this networked environment where humans, platforms and algorithmic systems now permanently coexist.
But despite these transformations, one thing remains essential: behind screens, data and algorithms, there are still human beings who create, search, doubt, feel and try to give meaning to the world they are moving through.
The digital is not the subject. The human being is.
It is humanity that created technologies, including artificial intelligence, to extend its capacities, share knowledge and continue transforming the world it inhabits.
I invite you to explore Understanding Today’s Culture, a series of micro-essays devoted to human experience, contemporary culture, and our networked world.
When we talk today about the use of artificial intelligence in art, the discussion almost always revolves around the same themes: AI-assisted creation, image, music and text generation, prompts, aesthetics, authorship, copyright, and authenticity.
These approaches are legitimate. They address real and necessary issues.
👉 But they leave aside a fundamental aspect of AI’s real impact on art and culture: circulation.
This reflection is also presented in video form.
The video deepens this reflection on the use of AI in art and on the role of algorithms in shaping contemporary culture.
Beyond creation: the blind spot of the debate
Public discourse on AI in art largely focuses on what AI produces. Yet the most profound transformation does not lie in what AI generates, but in how art circulates, becomes visible, is contextualized, archived, or forgotten.
AI does not only create images, sounds, texts, or videos. It organizes the conditions under which works encounter audiences.
A global, automated, and selective circulation
Today, works circulate through systems governed by algorithms:
search engines,
social media platforms,
databases and archives,
recommendation systems,
conversational artificial intelligences.
This circulation is neither neutral nor always equitable.
Certain works benefit from massive visibility, while others remain marginal or invisible—often independently of their artistic value.
And paradoxically, artists themselves often have little control over these mechanisms:
they do not know how algorithms function,
they do not understand why a work circulates or not,
they cannot clearly identify what triggers visibility or invisibility,
they frequently navigate these systems blindly.
AI as algorithmic mediator
AI now acts as a form of automated cultural mediation at a planetary scale.
Where human mediators—critics, institutions, educators, curators, programmers—once played a central role, algorithmic systems increasingly orient access to works, references, and cultural narratives, often invisibly and without explicit explanation.
These systems select, prioritize, translate, summarize, recommend, and archive cultural content at a planetary scale.
A worldwide phenomenon
This algorithmic circulation now concerns all regions of the world.
Whether in India, China, Africa, the Americas, Europe, or Australia, artworks, images, narratives, and cultural forms enter the same digital infrastructures of diffusion, recommendation, and indexing.
However, while networks are global, conditions of visibility are not always equal. Algorithms tend to favor certain languages, formats, and aesthetics, sometimes marginalizing artistic and cultural expressions that are nonetheless vibrant and alive.
The global circulation of art organized by AI thus raises critical issues of cultural diversity and representation that go far beyond national borders.
Cultural responsibility therefore remains human, even within algorithmic infrastructures.
AI as organizer of visibility and cultural memory
Beyond circulation, AI plays a growing role in shaping cultural memory.
What is indexed, cited, summarized, recommended, or reused contributes to defining what will be remembered, transmitted, and legitimized over time.
This transformation increasingly unfolds outside traditional institutions—galleries, museums, academies—within digital infrastructures whose criteria remain opaque.
The impact is profound: it reshapes how art is perceived, recognized, transmitted, and preserved in the 21st century.
A historical perspective
I have been using the web since the mid-1990s. At that time, artists were already questioning how to exist online: creating virtual galleries, sharing images of artworks, and exploring new forms of visibility and circulation.
Long before generative AI or conversational systems, algorithms were already shaping how culture circulated—through early search engines, indexing mechanisms, and later, recommendation systems.
For more than thirty years, algorithms have structured the circulation of culture: from early search engines in the 1990s, to social media platforms, recommendation systems, and now large-scale AI models.
Generative AI is only the most visible layer of a much older infrastructure that has long organized access to culture.
The artist as an actor of circulation
In this context, the role of the artist evolves.
The artist is no longer only a creator of objects, texts, or concepts, but also:
an actor of circulation,
a witness to algorithmic mechanisms,
responsible for how their work enters the global network.
Publishing, linking, indexing, documenting, and observing the circulation of works becomes an artistic act in itself.
The artist becomes not only a creator, but also a conscious participant in algorithmic visibility systems.
A situated practice: humanist digital art
Within what I define as a humanist digital art approach, I create, publish, and observe works while fully acknowledging that they immediately enter algorithmic systems of diffusion, indexing, and interpretation.
These works are not conceived as isolated objects, but as presences that circulate, transform, and inscribe themselves within a shared digital memory.
The goal is not to submit to algorithms, nor to reject them, but to remain attentive to their effects and to reaffirm the centrality of human experience.
Beyond creation
We speak extensively about AI as a tool for creation.
But the most profound impact lies elsewhere: in the way algorithms quietly organize the global circulation of art and culture.
As long as art and culture speak of humanity, the human will remain at the heart of the digital world.
To situate this reflection on AI infrastructure within the corpus of Humanist Digital Art
I invite you to explore Understanding Today’s Culture, a series of micro-essays devoted to human experience, contemporary culture, and our networked world.
