Putting Artificial Intelligence to good use in the cultural sector
By 2025, it seems essential to enable employees and stakeholders in the cultural sector to share the challenges of AI within their professional context, to explore its potential, and to implement responsible and cooperative uses, for a better execution of their professional missions. This also allows cultural stakeholders to position themselves strategically, in line with the values they uphold.
Initial ideas for an action-training program
How to begin with a conscious, responsible, and effective use of AI? I propose a draft training/support program.
Common Core
Half a day. Understanding the history and challenges of AI at the environmental level, as well as economic, political, cultural systems of domination, etc. This would be a fairly playful and lively moment, where we create things, have fun, and keep traces of all this, which also creates connections. We conclude with the various possibilities of AI, whether in content generation or in agency (i.e., AI that performs tasks on our behalf, or allows us to automate tasks). We thus end with concrete leads within the specific context of the cultural structure.
General Workshops
Half a day, three parallel workshops. Participants spend 45 minutes in each workshop and rotate through all three:
- Workshop “My Skills with AI”: Each person would come to share their skills, to identify the skills present. We would have a mapping of the skills of each individual within the structure.
- Workshop “My Desires with AI”: for those who have desires to explore things with AI and are motivated by it.
- Workshop “My Professional Needs”: with the perspective of questioning how AI could help.
We identify potential “AI mentors” among the employees of the structure or the professional network. These are people who can dedicate a small part of their time to helping others implement AI projects.
Sectoral Workshops
Half a day. The different activity sectors of the structure or network are identified by tables, and we rotate, somewhat in the principle of the World Café, to contribute ideas for uses of AI to improve the quality of work. It is from these sectoral workshops that choices and arbitrations could be made by the management of the structure.
Implementation after the action-training phase
Within the framework of a cultural structure, it is necessary to respect Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR: the voluntary integration, by companies, of social and environmental concerns into their commercial activities and their relations with stakeholders). To implement a responsible use of AI, I propose three steps:
- A step of responsible choice by the management of the structure on which AI tools are used, as social and environmental responsibility is very important, including with AI. This may impose certain limits, but we are dealing with a structure funded by public money that cannot do just anything.
- Organization of the internal mentoring system.
- Setting up a short, non-mandatory quarterly meeting on the subject of the use of AI in the structure or in the network.
Material Suggestions – Early 2025
- A Swiss host, Infomaniak, offers AI tools where there is no data surveillance and as little carbon footprint as possible: https://www.infomaniak.com/fr/hebergement/ai-tools (they have now integrated the very powerful Chinese Open Source AI Deepseek on their own servers).
- Quick benchmark of generative AIs in early 2025:
- ChatGPT: good for structuring things, but overall quite average in my opinion.
- Deepseek: the best by far, in my opinion as well.
- Claude: rather good for subjects related to writing.
- Perplexity: the one that does web searches to answer, and provides references.
- To install an LLM on your own computer: the LM Studio software.
Cultural policy" is a tradition of the French state since the Middle Ages. It was initiated by Louis XIV in the 17th century as a tool of influence and power. And it was defined in its current terms by André Malraux in 1959, with the State’s mission being the democratization of art in society. But today the cultural policies are multiple, because carried by the public authorities at other levels than that of the State (cities, agglomerations, departments, regions) and in many other places, in particular associative (places and cultural actions), individual (the initiatives of the artists, professionals or amateurs) and by private companies (trade of the culture).
The “digital revolution”, i.e. the ubiquitous, personalized and transitive access to information as well as the production by peers as a new model, deeply disrupts the “rules” of implementation of cultural policies, whether at the public or private level, and puts many actors in difficulty to reach their objectives. I propose here tools to understand the stakes of this “digital revolution” and concrete ways of working, hoping to bring useful resources to the work of cultural policies, in all types of contexts.
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