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UNESCO’s A.I. Report Considers How Technology Can Serve Culture

Artificial intelligence, it says, will expand access to culture, protect heritage and open new artistic possibilities—provided that human rights, diversity and creativity remain central to its governance.

UNESCO’s mission is not only to preserve the heritage left behind by previous generations, but also to identify, track and promote the circulation of knowledge and ideas that foster further cultural creation, development and dialogue. It’s a mission that inevitably straddles past, present and future, and so the organization could not avoid confronting one of the biggest elephants in the room today: the role of A.I. in reshaping how ideas circulate, develop and take form in contemporary culture. The latest UNESCO survey on A.I., prepared with the Artificial Intelligence and Culture (CULTAI) Independent Expert Group, gathers views and advice on the evolving relationship between culture and artificial intelligence.

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The key finding is that A.I. is already transforming how culture is created, shared and preserved by expanding access, safeguarding heritage, amplifying diverse voices and opening new creative possibilities. At the same time, however, this technology can also deepen inequalities, intensify biases, accelerate cultural homogenization and increase environmental costs. UNESCO also acknowledges complex ethical and practical risks posed by A.I., which the organization had already begun to confront via its 2017 Operational Guidelines for updating the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions for the digital age and the landmark 2018 report, Re|Shaping Cultural Policies. Nearly a decade ago, those documents identified A.I. as a transformative agent in content generation, reframing the creative value chain and positioning data at the core of cultural policy. At the time, UNESCO asserted that the coming transformation would require a governance framework anchored in three essential pillars: transparency, participatory design and accountability.

In 2021, 194 UNESCO member states adopted the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence—the first and, so far, only global normative instrument on A.I. that explicitly includes culture as a specific domain. The text provides essential ethical principles and advocates for creators’ rights in the A.I. context. In 2023, UNESCO further expanded this framework with guidelines for regulating digital platforms, urging safeguards for freedom of expression, access to information and culturally sensitive A.I. moderation, including bias audits across languages and contexts.

The latest report was part of the preparatory work for MONDIACULT 2025, held in Barcelona, which brought together member states to consider future global cultural policies.

The challenges of A.I., as outlined by UNESCO

The acceleration of A.I. and artificial intelligence-powered technologies is widely acknowledged to have already exceeded the capacity of cultural ecosystems to adapt, outpacing governance policies and potentially threatening sovereignty, pluralism and democratic oversight, while raising ethical questions about authorship and rights. At the core of UNESCO’s report is an urgent call for global cooperation and inclusive governance. While some regional or local initiatives and policies are already being implemented, the global nature of these transformations makes it essential that all countries develop national A.I. strategies that incorporate the cultural dimension and address concerns like:

The reinforcement of bias and homogenization

Unbalanced training data and algorithmic personalization reproduce stereotypes and foster monocultures, obscuring cultural distinctiveness, widening inequalities and even exacerbating injustices. The document highlights how unequal control over A.I. tools and platforms, once combined with disparities in digital technologies, skills and knowledge, can undermine the very principle of culture as a global public good. As A.I. systems are largely trained on “collective commons,” they tend to perpetuate biases and stereotypes rooted in dominant epistemologies. Several data points in the survey bear this out: Midjourney, for example, represents women in only 23 percent of images and people of African descent in 9 percent, compared with........

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