Cambridge, England, is where Alan Turing, the mathematician who laid the foundations for modern computer science and artificial intelligence (AI), served as a fellow. The city remains a symbolic space evoking the archetypal thinking of AI and continues today as a core hub of AI research. The University of Cambridge's "Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence" doctoral program sets out to train the next generation of researchers who will design human-centered, responsible, and socially beneficial AI. In the end, the question is one: from what aspects of humanity and from what values shall we draw AI's inspiration?
The recent annual conference of the Association for Art History held at the University of Cambridge was a gathering that intensively showed how Western art history views AI. Over three days, more than 470 papers were presented across some 100 sessions. Among them, four sessions and roughly 20 paper presentations addressing AI stood out. At this conference, AI was the most cutting-edge topic, and sessions that framed it from practical perspectives such as curating and art history education drew particular attention.
The first day's session sharply revealed critical discourse surrounding AI and the art world. Discussions addressed how the structures of computing and AI objectify the female body, and how text- and image-generation tools distort social values such as "care." The next session introduced cases in which artists from Southeast Asia and Latin America reconfigure technology as a means of resistance and subversion. On the morning of the second day, the art history education session raised hallucinations, ethics, and the side effects of digital learning environments as key issues. The Western tone running through these presentations was relatively clear: bias, hallucination, coloniality, and gaze. The stance was that AI is an object of caution and that scholarship must maintain a critical perspective.
I offered a different perspective in the final session, "AI and Curation: Risks and Opportunities." Citing the human-AI collaborative digital cultural heritage exhibition conducted at the Korean Cultural Centre UK as an example, I argued that AI need not be seen only as a threat but can be understood as a partner in care, interpretation, and expansion. I stressed that when we view technology more optimistically and take AI as a new object of collaboration, both the interpretation of cultural heritage and the imagination of the future can become richer. My optimistic presentation was as popular as a K-drama.
Korea, I believe, can embrace AI in a practical form and unfold its own meanings within it. Just as K-pop has become universal music enjoyed together by different people across the world, the golden key lies in a Korean aesthetic that unfolds each person's emotions and meanings within a shared form. What matters in the AI era is concentrating imagination and giving voice to the current that seeks to elegantly express human meaning through technology. When we gather our will not around the technical level of AI but around what culture we wish to create through AI, the nation's future will meet a new turning point.
