Strange Undercurrents: A Critical Outlook on AI's Cultural Influence

TL;DR

This paper critically examines how generative AI influences art, culture, and society by propagating ideological and technical concepts from AI industry, highlighting the need for nuanced understanding of its broader cultural impact.

Contribution

It offers a critical analysis of AI's ideological and conceptual underpinnings and their influence on art and culture, emphasizing overlooked ideological aspects.

Findings

AI propagates ideological and technical concepts into mainstream culture.

Generative AI influences art notions through philosophical, technical, and political vectors.

The influence of AI in culture often involves conflicting but coalescing ideas.

Abstract

While generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) is being examined extensively, some issues it epitomizes call for more refined scrutiny and deeper contextualization. Besides the lack of nuanced understanding of art's continuously changing character in discussions about generative AI's cultural impact, one of the notably underexplored aspects is the conceptual and ideological substrate of AI science and industry whose attributes generative AI propagates by fostering the integration of diverse modes of AI-powered artmaking into the mainstream culture and economy. Taking the current turmoil around the generative AI as a pretext, this paper summarizes a broader study of AI's influence on art notions focusing on the confluence of certain foundational concepts in computer science and ideological vectors of the AI industry that transfer into art, culture, and society. This influence merges diverse and sometimes inconsistent but somehow coalescing philosophical premises, technical ideas, and political views, many of which have unfavorable overtones.