A lab for cultural intelligence
Eighty professionals from the cultural and creative sectors (artists, curators, and experts from museums, foundations, libraries, and cultural enterprises) gathered in Naples for the first in-person campus of Generativa, the free Academy designed by Consorzio Materahub, Cluster Basilicata Creativa, Tlon and L’Orientale University of Naples, under the scientific direction of Sineglossa.
The program aims at fostering a critical and practical understanding of generative artificial intelligence and its impact on the cultural and creative industries.
Over two days, the Fabbrica Italiana dell’Innovazione in Naples turned into a collective laboratory of cultural intelligence, where philosophy, art, ethics, linguistics, and technology intertwined. The goal: to explore how AI can expand – rather than replace – our human and collective intelligence.
The training program, offered in a pilot version never tested before, received very positive feedback, as shown by the evaluation questionnaires: 73% of participants reported being very or extremely satisfied with the experience. They described the course as intense and stimulating on multiple levels, both in terms of approaches and content, and in the quality of human and professional interaction.
Participants appreciated “the level of the professional expertises involved” and “the richness of contents”, “the possibility to look at AI from multiple points of views. To embrace complexity”, “the variety of the approaches” and, last but not least, the human factor: “The atmosphere among teachers and participants was of authentic interaction”. Many participants declared they already changed the approach to AI in their work: “Everytime I use ChatGPT, I not only ask myself what I can do, but how I can do it consciously”.
What we learnt
Here some key concept emerged during the five on-campus lessons:
AI as pharmakon — Andrea Colamedici
For Andrea Colamedici, writer, philosopher, and co-founder of TLON, artificial intelligence can be compared to Plato’s pharmakon: it holds an ambivalent power, poison and cure at the same time. The difference lies in humanity’s ability to manage and balance it. That’s why Colamedici invited participants to “handle it consciously,” encouraging a collaborative relationship between humans and artificial intelligences.
AI should not be feared as a replacement, but embraced as a co-creator, in a symbiosis that enhances the human and neutralizes the threat of cognitive asymmetry.
Tools such as the “Protocol for a Critical Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence” and the “VACCA Framework – Verification, Analysis, Comparison, Critique, Application,” presented by Colamedici, were designed precisely to help build this dialogical relationship with AI.
The Protocol, structured in three points, invites us to: question AI as an interlocutor rather than an oracle, involving it in an active process of co-building of thought; critically determine which tasks to assign to AI and which to continue performing ourselves, in order to preserve essential cognitive abilities; and finally, to truly know the tool, to understand the limits and potential of AI so we can remain critical of both its outputs and our own thinking processes.
Technology is never neutral — Diletta Huyskes
Diletta Huyskes, sociologist and co-CEO and co-founder of Immanence, illustrated through various examples and real-world cases how no technology is ever neutral, but always the result of political and cultural choices.
From the “discriminatory” bridges of New York designed by Robert Moses to the exceptions within the European AI Act, she explained how artificial intelligence systems are never neutral: they reproduce – and sometimes amplify – the biases of the society that creates them, often reinforcing mechanisms of control and coercion.
Her message to the cultural sector was clear: ethics is not a technical add-on, but an act of collective responsibility.
Each of us must be aware that every implementation of AI and automated processes – also and especially in the cultural and creative industries – has real consequences for people in the real life. These consequences must be considered in advance, at the design stage, so that we can take responsibility for them.
AI and Cultural Heritage — Martina Bagnoli
Martina Bagnoli, art historian and chairperson of Europeana, brought the perspective of AI in museums, drawing on her international experience in leading museums and cultural institutions. She explained that AI can become a valuable tool to automate cataloging, improve accessibility, and clean discriminatory language from historical metadata (as seen in the European DE-BIAS project).
Bagnoli emphasized, however, that automation is only the final result of a long human effort that should not be forgotten. Through several case studies on the intersection of AI and artistic practices – ranging from the artistic practice of Refik Anadol to AI-DA, the first humanoid robot artist-the class engaged in a debate on the automation of creative processes, the status of art and the artist, and the need to rethink roles such as software developers as on par with artists.
How does a machine think? — Bernardo Magnini
Together with Bernardo Magnini, researcher at the Bruno Kessler Foundation, the class learnt the basics of “AI literacy,” understanding how language models work and, most importantly, what they cannot do.
Magnini explained that Large Language Models (LLMs) do not possess intrinsic meaning: they operate on mathematical representations of words (vectors) and can make mistakes due to a lack of context or real-world experience. He reminded the class that: “There is no perfect oracle; human fact-checking is always required for generated texts.”
From ancient philosophy to sci-fi — Simone Arcagni
Simone Arcagni, writer and Associate Professor at IULM University of Milan, traced a cultural genealogy of AI: from Plato to Leibniz, through John Cage, Solaris, and the Arte Programmata exhibition, Arcagni showed how culture and technology have always gone hand in hand, and that the idea of “artificial intelligence” emerges from centuries of imagination and questions about what it means to be human.
For Arcagni, understanding AI today means recognizing the historical continuity between art, philosophy, and technology, and valuing the cultural specificity of each innovation. He highlighted science fiction as “the most truthful symbolic space where we process our relationship with technology.”
Next steps of the Academy
This first campus is not a final destination, but the beginning of a community of practices. The skills acquired by participants, when applied in their professional contexts – museums, archives, schools, and creative enterprises -will turn them into ambassadors of a new approach to AI within the cultural sector.
Generativa continues from October through December with synchronous and asynchronous modules tailored to the three pathways: GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums), artists, and ICC (Cultural and Creative Industries). In January, the program will conclude with another in-person session in Naples, featuring a final co-design and prototyping workshop led by Ecosistemica.
If you want to learn more about the perceptions, needs, and operational and ethical priorities that emerged during the sessions, download our report on Generative AI in the cultural sector.
