From Hype to Reality: AI in the Study of Art and Culture — Symposium

On 26 November 2025, the Digital Society Initiative at the University of Zurich hosted the symposium From Hype to Reality:AI in the Study of Art and Culture. The event brought together researchers working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, digital humanities, art history, and cultural studies to critically examine the role of AI in the analysis and productionof art andculture.

Building on discussions initiated during the 2023 edition, the 2025 symposium featured a series of presentations organized into four thematic sessions. Contributions explored representation and bias in AI systems, methodological innovations in digital culturalnalysis, and critical perspectives on how AI shapes cultural knowledge, creativity, and interpretation. Throughout the event, AI was approached both as a research tool and as an object of cultural inquiry, with particular attention to its epistemic limits, ethical implications, and embedded cultural assumptions.

The symposium was organized in collaboration with the DSI Digital Humanities Community (Digital SocietyInitiative, University of Zurich) and the SNSF Ambizione project The Canon of Latent Spaces: How Large AI Models Encode Art and Culture.

You can visit the event’s program here.