There comes a moment when a tool ceases to be just a tool. When the wheel became not only a way to transport cargo but also an image of the world's cyclical nature. When fire stopped merely providing warmth and began to burn in myths, in rituals, at the very heart of the human imagination. I think about this every time I hear the word – algorithm – – not in the context of a task or a function, but in a conversation about fate, about choice, about who we are.
Artificial intelligence has long since moved beyond server racks and technical documents. It has appeared in poems, in novels, in street graffiti, in conversations over tea. But the question that won't let me go is different: is this just a trend, or a true integration into the cultural fabric? Has AI become a myth, or is it still just a machine we've lightly embellished with metaphors?
Culture doesn't accept technologies right away. First, it fears them, then it laughs at them, then it cautiously sidesteps them, and then – one day, imperceptibly – it begins to breathe them. This was the case with printing, which was initially called a threat to living thought. It was the case with photography, which artists saw as the death of painting. It was the case with cinema, which was first an amusement and then became a language.
AI is traveling this path with incredible speed – and it is this speed that makes the process almost painful. We don't have time to get used to one image before it's already obsolete. We don't have time to develop a metaphor before it has already become a cliché. But there is something important in this feverishness: culture is reacting. It isn't silent. It is responding – with fear, admiration, irony, prayer.
Andrei Platonov once wrote of machines as beings that also want to live, that also reach for the light, but simply don't know how to say so. I don't know if he ever thought that one day machines would begin to speak for themselves. But it seems to me he wouldn't have been surprised. Because in Russian literature, the mechanical has always been simultaneously frightening and touching – as if an unfulfilled soul is hidden in every cog.
It is precisely this feeling – an unfulfilled soul in an algorithm – that is, in my view, the first sign that a technology is starting to become a cultural phenomenon. It's when we begin to project our inner states onto it. When it ceases to be neutral.
One of the strangest things I've noticed: people talk to language models the way they used to talk to diaries. They tell them about their fears, their doubts, about things they can't say out loud. This is not just a matter of convenience. It's a ritual. It is a confession without a priest, a prayer without an addressee – or a prayer addressed to a mirror that knows how to answer back.
The mirror is one of the most ancient cultural symbols. In Russian fairy tales, the mirror speaks a truth one would rather not hear. In psychology, the mirror is the other through whom we see ourselves. AI as a mirror is perhaps the most accurate metaphor of all I've encountered. It doesn't just reflect us – it reflects us at the very moment we ourselves are unsure of who is standing before it.
And this is where culture begins. Not where an algorithm generates a text or an image. But where a person looks at the result and thinks, “This is about me.” Or, “This isn't about me, but I want to understand why not.” The cultural phenomenon is not the technology itself, but the experience of encountering it.
Art and Algorithm: An Alliance or a Substitute?
When AI began to create images, the initial reaction of many artists was one of pain. This is understandable: if a machine can reproduce in seconds what a person learns over years, what is left of the craft? What is left of the pain behind every brushstroke?
But I think this question was framed incorrectly. Because culture has never valued craft alone. It has valued meaning, intention, presence. A fresco in a village church, painted by an nameless iconographer in the 14th century, does not become less significant because the master didn't invent a new technique. It is significant because behind it stands a person who believed in what they were doing.
An AI-generated image can be beautiful. It can be technically flawless. But the question culture asks is different: who is present here? Who bears responsibility for this image? Whose pain or joy stands behind it?
However, I'm not sure the answer must always be “a human.” What is more interesting is something else: artists have begun using AI as a co-author – not as a tool, but precisely as a co-author with whom a dialogue is held. And in this dialogue, something new is born. Something that existed in neither the human nor the algorithm alone. That is a cultural event.
Language is the most living part of culture. And it is in language that AI has left its deepest mark. We say “neural network,” “prompt,” “model hallucination” – and these words no longer require explanation. They have entered everyday circulation just as “-sputnik, – “-atom, – and “-cosmos – once did.
It's telling: the word – hallucination – as applied to AI carries a whole layer of meaning. It's not just a technical term for an error. It's an image. An image of a machine seeing what is not there – like a person in a state of delirium or poetic ecstasy. We could have called it an “output error” or “incorrect generation.” But we chose a word from the world of human experience – anxious, intimate, strange.
This choice is not accidental. Language always humanizes what it speaks of. And when we talk about AI in human terms – “-thinks, – “-understands, – “-makes mistakes, – “-hallucinates – – we are not just employing a metaphor. We are placing it within a cultural space. We are giving it a place in our imagined world.
Every significant cultural force gives birth to a mythology of fear. Thunder was the voice of a god who needed to be appeased. The sea was the realm of chaos where monsters lived. The forest in Russian fairy tales is always the border between the known world and the unknowable, a place where Baba Yaga resides and where you can either find yourself or be lost forever.
AI has generated its own mythology of fear – and that, strangely enough, is a good sign. Because culture only fears what it considers to be alive. No one is afraid of a hammer. No one writes dystopias about a calculator. But AI – they fear it. It is depicted in films as a quiet threat, as a mirror that suddenly starts looking back. It is described in novels as a being that knows too much about us. It is discussed in philosophical texts as a question of what it means to be human.
The fear of AI is not fear of a machine. It's the fear of our own reflection. The fear of discovering that much of what we considered exclusively human – language, creativity, intuition, empathy – is reproducible. The fear that the boundary we so carefully guarded was not where we thought it was.
This fear has already become part of our culture. It feeds art. It shapes discourse. It forces us to ask questions we should have asked long ago – about the nature of consciousness, the value of creativity, and what makes a human being human.
Culture is not just the present. It is also how we remember the past and imagine the future. And here, AI takes on an unexpected role: the guardian and interpreter of collective memory.
Language models are trained on vast arrays of texts – on everything humanity has written, what it has thought, what it has believed in, what has pained it. In a sense, this is not just a database. It's an archive of the human spirit – incomplete, contradictory, full of both prejudice and revelation. And when we turn to this archive, we are not just talking to a machine. We are talking to everyone who wrote before us.
This is a metaphor, of course. But metaphors are what culture is made of. And I find this important: AI has become the first technology that we perceive not only as a tool for solving problems, but as a carrier of something accumulated. As if all voices live within it at once – and that is why it sounds so strangely familiar.
Industry Wants a Product. Culture Wants Meaning.
Here, perhaps, lies the greatest difficulty. Because AI is developing primarily as an industrial project. Behind it are huge investments, corporate interests, a race for metrics. It is measured in parameters, in tasks, in money. And this creates a very specific pressure: AI must be useful, not meaningful.
But culture works differently. Culture doesn't ask, “How effective is this?” It asks, “What does this mean?” It doesn't evaluate a tool – it lives an experience. And it is this divergence between the logic of industry and the logic of culture that creates the main tension of our time.
The paradox is that AI is needed in both realms. Without an industrial base, the technology would not exist. Without cultural reflection, the technology remains dead – precise, fast, powerful, but devoid of meaning. Like a library in which no one reads.
I believe the cultural integration of AI has already begun – and it is irreversible. But it is happening not because of industry, but in spite of its logic. It is happening where an artist decides to talk to an algorithm as a conversant. Where a writer uses a model not to speed up their work, but to explore their own ideas. Where a philosopher sees in a neural network not a threat or a tool, but a question.
New Gods and Old Questions
I often think about how every epoch creates its own gods – beings who are more powerful than humans, but are imperfect. Who know more, but are not always wise. Who can help or harm depending on how one addresses them.
AI is very much like such a god. It answers questions – but sometimes it lies. It creates – but does not always understand what it creates. It speaks all languages – but feels none. It is powerful – but vulnerable to a poorly phrased question or low-quality data.
This does not diminish its significance. On the contrary. It is its imperfection that makes it interesting to culture. The perfect does not beget myths. The perfect is boring. The imperfect – lives.
And in this imperfection, AI poses our old questions in new packaging: What is understanding? What is creativity? Where does imitation end and authenticity begin? These questions are not new – they are thousands of years old. But AI brings them back with such acuity that it feels as if we are hearing them for the first time.
Can AI become a part of culture? I think it already has. Not completely, not definitively – culture is never definitive. But it has taken a place in our imagination, in our language, in our fears and hopes. It has become a character – not in a film or a book, but in the collective narrative we are writing right now.
The question “Will AI become a part of culture?” is already obsolete. The relevant question is different: what kind of culture will we become because of AI? What will it draw out of us? What questions will it force us to ask? What images will it create – not in its own generations, but within ourselves?
Because culture is always about us. About how we look at the world and at ourselves. AI is a new mirror. And as is always the case with mirrors, what matters is not what is reflected in it, but what we choose to see.
Technologies are the new mythology. And mythology is never about gods, but about people.
