Has AI Become Our Cultural Maker?

Who decides what culture is?

For most people these days, culture arrives through feeds. Endless scrolling, fast and quick, short attention-span.

When a song appears it is because a platform thinks it fits a pattern. A film is suggested because a viewer watched something similar. A short video becomes visible because engagement signals are worth more than editorial judgement, and none of these things are necessarily bad – we all like the ease of being recommended something based on interests, it’s human.

However, we have reached the point central to many cultural questions in the artificial intelligence era.

AI is usually discussed as a creator (we like to think of it as a generating tool, no creation, just the ability to put two and two together using input that was already there but that’s a topic for another time), but beside the point, is it really creating and selecting? Isn’t just repeating back what it learned? Is it curating or matching to behaviours linked to interests? Is it deciding what culture is on our behalf?

It ranks. It filters. It recommends. It predicts what we may want next and in doing so, it seems to be shaping ‘taste’, attention and cultural memory – yes this is the part where it starts to get a bit concerning.

What is happening?

The shift is already being felt across music, film, publishing, and museums and others.

In music, discovery has moved away from more traditional means. MIDiA Research found that for 16–24-year-olds, the leading music discovery channels are TikTok, YouTube, streaming platforms and social media. This is positive, it means we are reaching wider audiences, but what exactly is reaching them?

The person, platform or system that decides what appears first, has influence over what becomes familiar, what becomes desirable and what becomes commercially viable.

The same logic applies across visual culture. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Pinterest and search engines now operate as cultural intermediaries.

Governments have started to recognise this. The European Union’s Digital Services Act requires very large online platforms and search engines - those with more than 45 million users in the EU - to meet stronger obligations ¹European Commission, “The Digital Services Act.”

The AI layer

Generative AI adds another layer.

The question is no longer only which human-made works are recommended. It is also whether audiences can identify what they are seeing or hearing.

In music, Deezer and Ipsos reported that 97% of surveyed listeners struggled to distinguish fully AI-generated music from human-made music in a blind test. The survey covered 9,000 participants². The same reporting found strong support for transparency, with 80% wanting AI-generated music to be clearly labelled.

AI-generated culture can enter the same discovery systems as human-made culture. It can appear in feeds, playlists, recommendations and search results. It can also be used for fraud, imitation and low-cost content flooding.

Deezer has responded by labelling AI-generated music and excluding labelled AI content from algorithmic recommendations. Associated Press reporting also noted Deezer’s concern that AI-generated tracks were being used by fraudsters to manipulate streams and collect royalties.

The broader music industry is moving in the same direction. In July 2026, organisations including the RIAA, IFPI, the Recording Academy, SAG-AFTRA and the Human Artistry Campaign announced a unified labelling approach for AI-generated and AI-assisted music. The aim is to make the creative origin of music clearer to listeners.

This is a cultural issue as much as a commercial one and transparency is becoming part of cultural literacy.

People want to know what they are listening to. They want to understand whether a work was made by a person, by a machine, or through a combination of both.

The problem

The problem is not that technology recommends culture. Recommendation has always existed.

Editors selected front pages. Critics reviewed books. Curators built exhibitions. Booksellers placed titles on tables. Festival directors chose line-ups. The list goes on…

The difference now is that this ‘creation’ or algorithmic logic is defining culture and our social fabric; it is also scale and speed, and that AI may optimise for watch time, listening time, completion rates, similarity, novelty, retention, advertising value or commercial performance. And just to be clear, this expands beyond music.

If every era is remembered through the Culture it produced and preserved, what will be left of ours when culture is increasingly shaped by platforms optimising for speed, engagement and commercial performance?

AI adds something more serious to the equation because it produces, imitates, multiplies, recommends and optimises content at scale. It does not just distribute human-made culture faster and wider. It fills the pipeline with synthetic, derivative or commercially tuned material.

What should people do?

Audiences have more agency than they may think. The problem is not simple, but the solution might be, at least the basics of it.

Moving beyond feeds and stepping out into the real world. Going to see live bands, go to a museum, travel, learn a language, go to a library and read an old-er book (because we hear even these, are now being AI written), engage with people in person - in real life, have a conversation, discuss a topic, have a laugh.

From Plutarch’s Table Talk to Cicero’s Roman forums, it’s the human engagement that leads to ideas and evolution.

We know that social media and AI companies have a lot to be held accountable for and that forms part of the solution. Regulators are starting to ask questions and the shift is starting to be felt, but it might take time.

Where should this go?

The future of culture should not be left in the hands of an algorithm. It’s human by nature, let’s treat it as such.

But if AI is indeed becoming one of our cultural editors, we need to decide what kind of editor it should be.

The List

Culture Desk will continue to follow the people, organisations and projects shaping this conversation.

The List is where we recognise those helping define what cultural visibility, authorship and influence mean.

Who should be part of this conversation?

Art Place invites recommendations, perspectives and ideas as we continue mapping the future of culture.

Sources

[1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-services-act. These include transparency around recommender systems and, on large platforms, the ability for users to choose non-personalised feeds. [2]Deezer, “Deezer/Ipsos Survey: 97% of People Can’t Tell the Difference Between Fully AI-Generated and Human Made Music,” 12 November 2025.