Does AI expand artistic possibility — or smooth it into sameness?
Creativity does not happen in isolation. It is rooted in cultures, traditions, and identities that give meaning to expression. Artificial intelligence adds a new layer to this process. By learning from vast datasets, it can recombine styles and motifs from across the world. But in doing so, it raises a question: does AI broaden culture by making more possible, or flatten it into averages and stereotypes?
The Promise of Expansion
AI can lower barriers to entry, giving people access to tools once reserved for professionals. It can surface forgotten styles, connect influences across borders, and help creators experiment beyond their training. In this sense, AI offers a form of cultural expansion — a way of multiplying voices and possibilities.
The Risk of Homogenisation
Yet most AI systems are trained on what is most available: mainstream datasets, dominant languages, and widely shared aesthetics. This means the outputs often converge on the familiar. Instead of amplifying diversity, systems can reinforce sameness — producing art that feels polished but generic, impressive but shallow.
Minority traditions and marginalised voices risk being absorbed, remixed, and repackaged without context, their distinctiveness blurred into the average.
Appropriation at Scale
Cultural appropriation is not new, but AI accelerates it. A single model can mimic countless traditions, sometimes without recognition or consent. What once took years of apprenticeship in a community can now be simulated in seconds. This raises ethical questions about respect, credit, and the value of lived experience in sustaining culture.
Why It Matters
Culture thrives on dialogue, not uniformity. If AI is to enrich rather than flatten, it must be designed and governed with care — attentive to whose voices it includes, whose it excludes, and how its use shapes the meaning of creativity itself. Otherwise, the risk is that abundance becomes sameness, and possibility becomes repetition.