From Reproduction to Replacement; the Ultimate Expression of the Culture Industry

                                                    Honest Conversation about AI

               The World Economic Forum just had their Annual Meeting for 2026 called “A Spirit of Dialogue.”  The Forum, according to their own website “connects leaders to make sense of global challenges and move the world forward together.”  The meeting at Davos, Switzerland is an invite-only ‘retreat’ for the “most influential people in the world” that of course, pay for the privilege.  Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli professor, somehow with the privilege and the notoriety to be a speaker at this event as a “medievalist, military historian, and public intellectual” according to his Wikipedia page.  He’s spoken at Davos previously, in 2016 where he presented the idea that “as a result of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, humanity will be divided between a superelite of improved humans and a mass of ‘useless people’,” stating that “power is in the hands of those who control the algorithms.”  Ultimately, he is a transhumanist with clout not explained in his public bio that has landed him at least two speaking gigs at arguably the most elite forum. 

               In this year’s speech, he presents “an honest conversation on AI and Humanity” wherein he states that the tension between humans and AI’s is between the spirit and the letter, claiming AI to be the new “master of words.”  “Everything made of words will be taken over by AI…previously, words originated from the human mind.  Soon, all the words in our mind will originate in a machine.”  His speech makes the claim that any realm of culture and civilization based on words; specifically, religion and law will be taken over by AI.  He describes this tension as being between “spirit and letter” and then proceeds to humanize AI by referencing “them” as immigrants that will “completely change the culture of every country, religion, and romance, because they will simply be “better” than us.

               This speaker portends a class distinction similar to the Marxist/socialist intellectuals of the culture critique clique, but rather than a top-predator capitalist bourgeoisie class we now have a non-human class supplanting “the masses” and our belonging to civilization itself.  AI threatens to be the ultimate culture industry, worsening all the derogations foretold by Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Hall.  The omnipresent phenomenon Adorno describes of the culture industry seems mild when considering the power potential of AI and the 'immutability of circumstances' it could bring.  Will we still be able to remain in our base form, as "merely centers where general tendencies meet" in a dialectic of cultural struggle, between points of resistance and suppression?  AI threatens to render our resistance useless and suppression total.  

    

    Walter Benjamin discusses how changes in technology and replication of culture will change the function of culture in society, and also how reproduction challenges the “aura” of texts and practices.  Aura in relation to AI as presented by Harari is akin to "spirit," but not of art but of humanity itself.  Even our mechanically reproduced, devalued and democratic creations get to be further mechanized via the singularity consciousness of AI.  All recorded creations are further flattened into data to be retrieved; the technique of reproduction replaced by the technique of encapsulation and recombination by a 'better' producer.  While all of AI's input will be from the devalued aura of human creation, what we will receive from it will be akin to the worship of facts as discussed by Adorno.  AI can fulfill Adorno and Horkheimer's claim that "a technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself."  Film, advertising, and mass media barely began to fulfill the claim.  While the style of the culture industry is the negation of style, then the omnipresence of AI will be the negation of human participation in all creative production, and perhaps consumption.  If the culture industry offered freedom from thought and negation through amusement, we will now have these offerings via irrelevance.

    "The rate at which [we] are reduced to stupidity must not fall behind the role at which [our] intelligence is increasing" is no longer a qualm for the culture industry; the technocratic elite have now "made sense" of this "global challenge" by creating an entire class of plagiarists, already predicted to be better at our words than we could ever be.  From artists and creators of aura and spirit to consumers and capitalists, our new evolvement excites us towards the label that AI has created for us: the watchers.