The Third Culture: Art After AI

Why does AI-generated work carry a recognizable sameness — even as it ranges across traditions, styles, and subjects? What does that tell us about both the machine and about art itself? What has art actually been for? Art has outlasted every challenge that was predicted to destroy it — but how was it transformed, and what did those challenges actually cost the people caught in the transition? Is the question of whether a machine can be a genius even the right one to be asking?

In this session, we begin with the history and philosophy of art in its many forms, then trace how the foundational ideas of the information age determine what these systems can and cannot do. That technical grounding turns out to be the entry point into something larger: the political economy of AI and art — who captures value when machines learn from human creative work, how power and institutions shape what gets built and what gets lost, and what all of this means for livelihoods, cultural traditions, and the aesthetic, ethical, and institutional frameworks we are still building.

This session is part of Imaginative Intelligences with G5A: The Origin of Thought, and is hosted by Dr. Neal Parikh, computer scientist, former Director of AI for New York City, and professor at Columbia University.

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Imaginative Intelligences with G5A: The Origin of Thought brings together technologists and cultural practitioners to reflect, learn, and inquire into the evolving relationship between humans and artificial intelligence, and the futures we are shaping.

Spanning five taster sessions and a three-day assembly, the initiative takes shape through AI demos, story labs, and conversations.

The initiative is in partnership with the Mozilla Foundation and the Berggruen Institute.