Generative AI changes how culture handles knowledge and truth
"AI is (not) the new...": A Diagnostic Analogy Framework for Generative AI's Cultural Impacts
Artificial Intelligence
Summary
Generative AI is changing how people find and make sense of knowledge, but it’s hard to understand what exactly is changing and how. The authors present a framework to analyze this shift by looking at where AI acts in the knowledge process, how it organizes information, and the technology it uses. Their approach helps identify real cultural changes caused by AI’s methods and separates these from things that can be changed by choice or design. This helps better guide policies and rules instead of relying on loose comparisons to old technologies.
What this means in practice
- •For policy makers: Design governance strategies that target specific cultural shifts caused by generative AI instead of vague analogies.
- •For knowledge management teams: Develop oversight methods for AI-driven knowledge tools by focusing on how AI changes information organization and authority.
A position paper. It proposes an approach and reports no results.
Authors
Rida Qadri, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Remi Denton
Abstract
Generative AI is reshaping the cultural infrastructures through which knowledge is found, synthesized, and held accountable. To make sense of this shift, scholars and policymakers reach for historical analogies of technologies such as the printing press, steam power or electricity. But these comparisons are typically imprecise about which property of the technology carries the comparison, and imprecise analogies produce imprecise governance by designing interventions against the wrong property of the system. This paper offers a diagnostic framework for analyzing how generative AI can transform epistemic and cultural practice. This paper offers a diagnostic framework for analyzing how generative AI can transform epistemic and cultural practice. We decompose each intervention into three coordinates: the epistemic site at which a technology acts, the governing logic by which it organizes its object, and the technical mechanism through which the logic is instantiated. This framework allows us to distinguish between structural cultural consequences, which follow from the mechanism itself, from contingent ones, which remain open to design and institutional choice. Applying the framework to information discovery and knowledge synthesis, we show how the shift from indexicality to inference and from editorial authority to statistical consensus produces specific, traceable cultural effects and reveals governance levers that gestalt analogy obscures.