A New Way to Discover and Explore Culture
Read this article in French:
Découvrir la culture mondiale en discutant avec une IA
A Scene from Everyday Life:
You connect to an artificial intelligence (AI) system.
You ask: “What does contemporary art mean?”
It gives you a definition.
Then it invites you to continue the conversation: “Would you like to explore its history, digital art practices, or its place in culture?”
A simple question has just opened up several paths of discovery.
This kind of exchange is not limited to contemporary art. It can also lead us to literature, poetry, music, cinema, traditions, and the many other expressions of human culture.
As the conversation unfolds, one answer may lead to another question, and then another. We can ask for clarification, compare works of art, discover artists, or make connections between different cultures. Little by little, a path of discovery takes shape, guided by our curiosity and the suggestions offered by AI.
With a search engine, we generally use keywords to find information and visit different web pages. With conversational AI, we can instead ask our questions directly. AI then becomes an intermediary that presents knowledge, makes connections, and suggests new directions for further exploration.
This way of exploring culture has a distinctive feature: we do not need to know exactly what we are looking for. A simple question sparked by curiosity can lead us to works of art, ideas, or traditions we did not know about. Conversation thus becomes another way to navigate the vast mosaic of global networked culture.
However, this exploration has its limits. AI systems do not know everything about human culture. Some works, languages, and traditions are less represented in the information available to them. Their responses may also contain errors. And discovering a work through conversation does not necessarily replace experiencing it directly.
AI systems are gradually becoming new tools, new guides, for exploring global networked culture. But it is still our curiosity, our questions, and our choices that give direction to this exploration.
Human culture remains a territory of discovery. We now have another way to explore it: conversations with AI.
📚 All Micro-essays
This text is part of the Understanding Today’s Culture series, a chronicle of our global networked culture.
→ Return to the Micro-essays page
Explore Further
🟦 How Do Images and Videos Shape Global Culture?
🟦 We Already Live in a Global Networked Culture
🟦 The Network Walker — Traversing Global Culture in the Algorithmic Age
© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor