UNESCO (2025) Report of the Independent Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence and Culture. Paris: UNESCO.

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has displaced culture from the exclusive domain of human expression into a techno-symbolic infrastructure where creativity, memory, economics and power are simultaneously reconfigured. The UNESCO CULTAI Report argues that AI presents transformative opportunities — including expanded cultural access, heritage restoration, preservation of endangered languages, reinforcement of creative industries and innovative artistic pedagogies — while simultaneously intensifying structural risks such as algorithmic bias, aesthetic homogenisation, exploitative extraction of cultural data, corporate concentration, labour precarity and the erosion of authorship. Its most intellectually significant contribution resides in redefining cultural data not merely as an economic resource but as a cognitive reservoir containing collective memories, practices, imaginaries and social values. Within this framework, AI systems emerge not as autonomous inventions but as derivative forms of collective intelligence constructed through the large-scale appropriation of digitised cultural life. Consequently, the report advances a rights-based paradigm grounded in three interconnected imperatives: recognition of cultural data as a collective common good, equitable access to AI infrastructures and redistributive mechanisms capable of compensating communities whose cultural expressions sustain artificial cognition. Particularly illuminating is the analysis of how algorithmic recommendation systems reshape cultural visibility and symbolic legitimacy, privileging dominant epistemologies while marginalising minority languages and Global South narratives. Through examples ranging from Indigenous linguistic AI initiatives in Aotearoa New Zealand to emerging regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act, the document demonstrates that the future of cultural sovereignty will depend upon the capacity of international governance to subordinate technological acceleration to the protection of human creativity, pluralism and cultural dignity. Ultimately, the report proposes a civilisational inversion: technology must remain an instrument serving culture rather than culture becoming a subordinate raw material for algorithmic extraction.