We live in a world where cultural artefacts — texts, images, sounds — are no longer produced exclusively by human beings. AI systems can now take up, imitate and recombine abilities we considered peculiar to our species.
What we are witnessing is not a transformation of the medium, but the entrance of a new actor — one able to take part in cultural production and to simulate a subjectivity it does not possess.
This shift forces us to rethink historical critical categories such as author, work, originality, intention and style: categories built for a world in which only humans created. They are no longer enough to describe practices in which the generative act arises from an asymmetrical collaboration between people and machines.
Generative AI systems produce plausible texts, images and narratives, but do not share the human conditions of understanding, intention and responsibility. The fracture is not only technological: it concerns how we interpret, evaluate and make sense of cultural artefacts.
The humanities can help us understand, orient and design the systems that take part in this new cultural scene — not at the margins of the process, but within it.
The artificial humanities, a term coined by researcher Nina Beguš, are an interdisciplinary field in which the humanities contribute to understanding, orienting and designing systems based on generative AI.
Their task is to investigate what emerges from this collaboration: the forms it takes, the ethical questions it opens, and the meaning it produces — or fails to.
Deckard exists for this: a space for research, writing and exchange in which authors, scholars and designers try to understand the passage underway and to build tools for orienting themselves within it.
Deckard is an independent observatory on the artificial humanities founded by Fabrizio Allione and Riccardo Milanesi. The name refers to Rick Deckard, the protagonist of Blade Runner, a figure who moves on the border between the human and the artificial. Here, though, no one hunts androids.
A teacher and author. He has worked on TV and film documentaries and takes part in the first European MFA in Creative Writing at ArtEZ University of the Arts in the Netherlands, where he is conducting a research and writing project on AI.
He teaches transmedia storytelling at Sapienza University of Rome and at the Holden School in Turin. He designs narrative ecosystems that integrate generative AI, community design and communication strategy for media and cultural institutions.