AI will Kill Culture.
I’ve noticed myself getting more and more frustrated with the flattening of culture due to algorithmic and AI influence in our daily content consumption. I can feel my world getting duller.
Algorithmic content consumption shows us things it thinks we want to see based on our engagement and inputs. Through these signals, it categorises us and puts us into boxes. This is the best way to sell adverts against us. These boxes, coupled with the addictive, repetitive nature of social and visual media apps stop us exploring outside of our comfort zones and our cultural world over time, becomes flatter.
Seeing things we dislike as much as things we like adds contrast to our lives and is the only way to add context and depth to the culture that becomes important to us.
The move in Instagram from chronological to algorithmic display was one of the largest best known examples of this. Overnight we moved from seeing things we might not care about from people we did care about, to seeing things we had an instant reaction to from people we barely knew. This had an effect of lessening our investment in the work of individual artists we might previously have become attached to, as we could always be presented with work by another artist we had a stronger, if shallower, initial reaction to.
Culture consumption up until the advent of algorithmic delivery was relatively scattershot. Our cultural diet consisted mainly of magazines, radio, mass market TV channels that had to cater to a larger, more diverse audience due to their prominence. The topline, broad nature of these publications allowed for smaller more niche publications to exist for those that wanted to drill down further. Even within these niches, we wouldn’t have a strong reaction to everything contained and this would add that contrast to how we felt about the things we discovered and loved.
The algorithmic sorting has a double edged effect. It can allow an artist or designer to hone a style relatively quickly if they’re optimising for visual impact. Equally, it can dissuade an artist exploring more difficult topics when the cultural acclaim is centred around these algorithmically driven platforms which prioritise instant engagement.
In the algorithmic consumption age, each of us lives in our own content house with little to connect us with those around us. This has a dampening effect on the discussion and spreading of cultural ideas through our own individual filter.
The advent of generative AI, large image and language models could lead us further down that path. Due to the fact that they’re trained on pre-existing imagery, can they ever produce something original? Their influences are frozen the second the training data stops. Humans are constantly adding to their own training data and that coupled with our individual lived experience in the world leads to more unique and deeper cultural outcomes.
The ‘black box’ nature of generative AI poses questions around it’s cultural value. Impactful culture is born of experience and how we as individuals relate (or don’t) to it’s context. The fact is, right now, an AI model can’t explain to us how it arrived at an outcome. Over the course of its training and polishing before it’s released to a wider audience, the weights within a model which guide its output will have been in turn have been guided. This should cause us to think more carefully about what it produces.
Discovering something new is what brings flavour to our lives. It allows us to recontextualise and think differently about our previous influences and allow us to produce something new in that process. The use of algorithms and AI to guide what we see lessens the chance of an unintended encounter with culture we may not already be familiar with and therefore lessens the chance of shifting the lens we view the world through.
We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, it will penetrate further into our lives as companies attempt to second guess our wants and needs and capture our attention for ever longer periods of time. We will be categorised infinitely and will be fed an unchallenging diet which will get blander as our tastes narrow. Through this process, our boxes will become smaller and eventually, AI will kill culture.
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