The enduring schism between culture and technique: Historical (dis)continuities between the Daguerreotype and Generative AI

This article contends that the promises and perils that people ascribe to so-called generative AI are in fact not so singular and that the debates around AI and the arts can be situated within a longer discursive lineage. We claim that antithetical responses to emerging new media historically tend to activate a perceived schism between culture and technique. As such, whenever a new technology appears to impact the artistic process, there is a tendency to present human culture as a constellation of specific friction-laden tasks that should either be protected from or supplanted by technology. To support this claim, we engage in a ‘topos study’ ( Huhtamo, 1997 ) to compare current discourses on the effects of generative AI on the arts with debates about the relationship between media and art that took place nearly two hundred years ago: François Arago’s 1839 report on the daguerreotype and Charles Baudelaire’s 1859 denunciation of photography. We identify four recurring topological commonplaces – usefulness of a new medium for the arts , democratization through technological means , antagonism between industrialization and art , and the impoverishment of artistic imagination , and argue that, when combined, they contain discursive contradictions about friction and frictionlessness that historically define the meanings ascribed to technology and its impact on the realm of culture.