Synthetic Culture Risks

Definition

Synthetic Culture Risks examines synthetic culture risks within the broader domain of preservation, transmission and adaptation of living culture under digitisation and AI.

Why this matters

Synthetic Culture Risks can materially affect human agency, capability, belonging, livelihoods, culture, trust, resilience and long-term societal outcomes.

Research questions

Under which conditions does synthetic culture risks improve human and system outcomes, how do effects vary across populations and contexts, and what safeguards prevent dependency, exclusion, distortion or loss of agency?

Hypotheses

A transparent, participatory and human-directed approach to synthetic culture risks, with explicit safeguards and longitudinal evaluation, will improve preservation quality; cultural fidelity; community control; access; language vitality; transmission; harmful appropriation compared with opaque, automation-first or short-term approaches.

Proposed methods

participatory cultural research; archival analysis; community governance review; language and metadata audits; longitudinal transmission studies; literature and policy review; expert and affected-user interviews; reproducibility testing; methods adapted specifically to Synthetic Culture Risks

Stakeholders and beneficiaries

creators; cultural custodians; communities; educators; researchers; publishers; platforms; collecting societies; libraries; archives; museums; regulators; funders