Artificial Intelligence: Let’s talk connection not just content

When people ask what AI means for the arts, the conversation goes straight to content. AI images. AI scripts. AI copy. Avatars. Copyright. Whether the machine is coming for our creatives. 

Yes, that matters, but it's not the whole question. 

AI may create extraordinary new artistic forms. Artists will use it as material, as provocation, collaborator, stage technology and new types of digital space. Culture has always absorbed new technology and turned it into new forms.  

But that's different from using AI to mass-produce a convincing imitation of art whilst losing the live relationship underneath it.  

How do cultural organisations use AI without surrendering the thing that makes art matter? How do we become more resilient, financially stable and connected to our audiences and visitors using AI without becoming more generic? 

For me, that is what AI literacy is really for. Not prompting. Not knowing which tool to use. Not getting a slightly better answer out of ChatGPT. 

Because the real ambition is not more content. It is more capacity for connection. 

Tasks change. They always have. I'm not worried that AI will change the tasks. 

I am worried that we automate the tasks without developing the people. That we strip out the memory, judgement and relationships that made those tasks meaningful in the first place and do not notice until they are gone. 

Because you can replace the software but you can't re-hire the people who understood your business. 

In my workshops I hand twenty people the same audience data. I get twenty different stories back. Confident and often simply wrong. AI is very good at making patterns visible. It's also very good at making patterns up. 

We can’t preserve every task but we need instead to preserve the judgement that went with it. 

We need judgement when the system points you to the efficient campaign and the hyper-personalised omni-channel experience. This spends the budget on the people who already come because that's where the return is. And hopefully someone in the team says: no. That's how we miss the audience we need to reach - the people who are not here yet. 

The machine is not wrong about the numbers. It's wrong about the purpose. Knowing the difference is our job.  

Because optimisation is not the same as purpose. A system will always point you back to the people who already respond in a self-fulfilling loop. Public purpose asks different questions:  

Who's missing? Who doesn't feel this is for them yet? What does our data fail to see? 

Cultural organisations are not just content. They are place. 

And by place I don't mean postcode. I mean context, community, memory and relationships.  The thing that happens when live work meets a particular audience, in a particular space and time. 

When organisations lose their relationship to place, community and live encounter, it starts to become just another kind of content. And if it becomes content, AI will be very good at imitating it. The language. The image. The trailer. The campaign. Perhaps even something that looks like a play. 

But it can't reproduce the live encounter. What happens in that room, on that night, between a work and the people in front of it, doesn't reproduce. 

The machine eats the reproducible. It can't eat presence. 

Do we become a content factory, pouring more and more content into a world already drowning in material? Or do we become more capable organisations: more rooted, responsive, imaginative, connected and more able to protect relationships at the heart of the work? 

There is maybe a real opportunity. Small teams can now shape tools around their own practice, instead of bending their practice around someone else's platform. 

And some organisations are grasping this opportunity. I saw this at a roundtable. An artistic director talked about building their own tools, to work in the way that works for them. Not fighting the software. Making it. The tool bending to you, instead of you bending to the tool. We are not only users of this technology anymore. We can be the creators of it. 

It might look ordinary at first. Reducing reporting time. Cleaning the data. Connecting audience insight to programming conversations. Improving access information. Analysing feedback with more care. Building a simple internal tool so the same work is not done five times over. 

It's not glamorous. But it is perhaps where resilience starts. Clean data. Shared knowledge. Better decisions. 

And then the capability grows. Audience intelligence. Community insight. Production knowledge. Marketing workflows. Access and inclusion. Evaluation. Internal memory. Collaboration with artists. Tools built around local practice. 

That is not the back office as an afterthought, it's the engine room of a cultural organisation. Because audience connection isn't separate from the art. It's the condition that allows the art to matter. 

Used well, AI can strengthen. It can help small teams do things that used to need larger teams, expensive consultants or custom software. It can free time for the human work and the conversations that build relationships. And for the decisions that should not be automated. 

But only if judgement stays inside our tasks and workflows. 

I suspect this also will become part of funding conversations. Not just whether we used AI efficiently but whether we used it in ways that protected public purpose. Did real people, with judgement, still hold our systems and our mission? Are we still reaching the people we exist to serve, or optimising ourselves towards the ones who already come. 

So, the organisations that do this well will not be the ones that buy the most tools. They will be the ones that develop their people fastest. The ones that build confidence, judgement and a shared language. The ones that understand enough about AI to use it wisely. The ones that know what to automate, what to check and what to refuse. 

We can shape the technology around people, place and context.  

The future is not to become more like the machine. I think the opportunity is the opposite. Use AI to do the reproducible, where it genuinely helps. Use it to build capability, not just output. Use it to support people, not hollow them out. Use it to make the organisation more able to hold the relationships between artist, audience and place. 

Because the real ambition is not more content. It's more capacity for connection. 

This is the new AI literacy and it's what the machine can't eat. 

Paul Blundell, Head of Digital Research and Development, Arts Marketing Association

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