Culture × AI

About the Workshop

A positive vision for culture in AI

Generative AI is increasingly recognised as a social and cultural technology. These systems process an enormous amount of social data to produce novel cultural artefacts, such as text, images, and videos. While much progress has been made in evaluating cultural aspects of AI, it has tended to focus on harm mitigation: identifying and preventing moral violations, the spread of bias and misinformation, and deviation from human values. But a more positive or constructive notion of culture in AI remains underdeveloped. How can we evaluate cultural aspects of AI technology in a way that not only seeks to avoid failure, but gives a more robust definition of success?

This workshop covers current approaches for evaluating cultural aspects of generative AI. Our primary focus is on work that aims to bring ideas and techniques from the humanities, arts, and qualitative social sciences upstream in AI development. We'll bring together a range of work at the intersection of culture and AI, with the goal of not just studying the effects of AI after deployment but also in actively shaping the design of the technology itself. The workshop will give special focus to research that seeks to articulate a positive vision for cultural AI.

A key theme in this workshop will be what we call Interpretive Technologies: approaches that take seriously the role of interpretive methods in understanding and improving AI systems. In many ways, the outputs of today's AI models resemble the kind of cultural artefacts traditionally studied by humanists. This means AI is not just a tool that produces culture; it is itself engaged in acts of interpretation. We invite submissions that take this seriously: work that asks how humanistic traditions of meaning-making, contextual sensitivity, and aesthetic judgment can be embedded in AI design, not just applied after the fact.

Crucially we welcome work that grapples directly with the tensions this research raises. Building AI systems that can "do" culture more effectively is not an unambiguous good: it poses real risks for artists, creative practitioners, and the broader cultural ecosystem. Ultimately, a positive vision for cultural AI will have to reckon with this. We encourage submissions that address these tensions in any form.

Call for Papers

We invite submissions across disciplines

We welcome submissions from all researchers working at the intersection of AI and culture. While a wide range of Culture × AI research will be featured, priority will be given to work that takes a position on how cultural AI can achieve a "positive" outcome beyond avoiding negative ones. For example: rather than developing the capacity to pursue pluralistic outcomes, a project could show how a specific cultural value could be supported by or reflected in an AI system — particularly where this extends rather than replaces human agency. We encourage submissions that do not fit neatly into mainstream AI discourse, as well as those that have potential for concrete, tangible societal impacts in application areas like sustainability and healthcare.

Organizers

The Team