Subcultural hegemony: AI in education and the arts

AI has outpaced us, thinks faster, scales wider, comprehends more. To cede cultural, emotional, and imaginative labor to algorithms is not progress; it is capitulation. Automated search engines or text-to-image prompt-to-creation systems are not just about machines; they now involve the executives, institutions, and stakeholders who determine how, where, and why these technologies are deployed.

When state companies and nation-state enterprises opt for the shortcut of AI-generated content in public communication and cultural production, the consequences go beyond the aesthetic and strike deeply at the level of meaning. It broadcasts a message louder than any campaign: that authentic creative labor is dispensable. Meanwhile, advocates argue that AI literacy should be treated as a public infrastructure issue, on par with education or access to information, to make society more resilient to systems capable of influencing our decisions and emotions. 

Yet removing human accountability breeds monsters: it undermines professional environments, disrupts competitive fields, and gradually erodes the human sense of initiative and creativity day by day. What was once a subculture, a shared resource, one requiring careful stewardship and limited use, is being transformed into an infrastructure of extraction and efficiency. 

Its social, cultural, and environmental costs are increasingly displaced outward, absorbed quietly by those who neither built it nor were consulted in its redesign. This shift, however, is not simply the result of technological inevitability or bad intentions. Rather, it extends to the gradual marginalisation of professional and creative roles in favour of optimised, automated services that quietly reconfigure the fabric of human work, expertise, and value.

Education integrated with AI

In China, university students now face educational landscapes stripped of artistic practice. Local universities that are less hesitant shutter arts degrees in the name of AI’s march. 

As reported by Al Jazeera’s Katrina Yu, such decisions render humans into passive bystanders. Moreover, the kinds of careers these students will pursue are increasingly shaped – or deformed – by this shift, ultimately orienting them away from traditional approaches to creative and performative work.

An open letter signed by some students of the university began circulating on social media. As a reaction to this outspoken strategy by the Chinese academic system, students reacted: 

When we saw the news, we were completely stunned. We applied to the Communication University because of these programmes. Now they’re being cut just like that. Will our diplomas still be recognised? What will happen to our remaining classes? And when we apply for jobs after graduation, will potential employers think we have also been eliminated in this game since our majors have been scrapped?

Once that path is normalized, it is unclear whether we, or our children, will recognize the contours of human creativity at all in the same way as we once did.

AI and the Performing Arts

AI is now also capable of generating avatars, songs, scripts, and even entire stage narratives. 

Fabrice Laffon is living proof of a professional exploring this new frontier of art and digital automation. He is the director of the legendary Madame Arthur, Pigalle’s historic drag cabaret. The troupe’s communications team unveiled Data von Tana, an AI-generated entity, at the beginning of April, signaling a subtle but profound shift in the cabaret’s artistic tone. 

Arkadi Zaides’ theatrical performance The Cloud is unique: much of the creative work – editing, staging, even the act of performance – is executed by artificial intelligence itself, rather than by the performer or the artist. If even learning to act can be algorithmically optimized and distributed at scale, the very foundation upon which theatre and performative arts stand begins to wobble.

Only by keeping firmly in mind that human creativity and AI literacy can and must coexist without machines “tricking” people will it be possible to manage the automation processes of contemporary society. Difficult? Yes, but our survival as human beings depends on our ability to assist human decision-making, never to replace it. 

The real question is not whether AI can replace performance, but whether enough people will stop caring about the difference to make replacement economically sufficient. That is a cultural question, not a technological one, and it is considerably more disturbing.

Featured image via Hollie Adams / Getty Images

By Tommaso Zerbi

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