We were present for your enjoyment at the 11th edition of the Entrepreneurship in Culture Forum on the beautiful campus of ENS Architecture Paris-Belleville on Thursday, July 3, 2025!
Here is what we saw:
Human creation vs. synthetic content: a fragile border
The panel discussion “Human creation vs. synthetic content” (10:00-11:15 am, Amphi B. Huet) addressed a central challenge of the digital age: how to guarantee visibility for human creation at a time when AI-generated content is proliferating online?
Faced with the rising quality of automated productions, it is becoming difficult to make the distinction. This panel discussion presented concrete initiatives led by professionals from culture, media, and tech to:
- Identify human creation in digital flows;
- Value original works;
- Build frameworks and labels capable of authenticating human productions.
The subject concerns many sectors: photography, journalism, music, visual arts. All face a common challenge: not letting AI make human creativity invisible.
Workshop “AI at the service of discoverability and exploration of collections”
(2nd floor Room 2)
This workshop highlighted the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence to improve access, visibility, and exploration of heritage collections. Through three concrete case studies, speakers presented innovative projects using AI to enrich the public experience and promote the discoverability of cultural resources.
Among the projects presented:
- La Philharmonie des savoirs from Cité de la musique – Philharmonie de Paris: an ambitious project for indexing speech-based archives, using artificial intelligence to make oral content more accessible and navigable.
- HikarIA, developed by Teklia in partnership with the Musée Guimet: this tool relies on AI to automatically analyze thousands of old photographs from Japan.
HikarIA notably allows for the automatic detection of images and their orientation, the generation of automated captions, and linguistic indexing — currently mostly in English, with adaptation work underway.
This technology offers a significant scale advantage, making collections more accessible to diverse audiences, whether they are researchers, photographers, or amateurs.
However, the system’s limits are also highlighted: an error rate higher than humans, biases difficult to control, and sometimes complex integration into existing information systems. - Gallica Images: a project by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) for indexing iconographic content in the Gallica digital library, aiming to enrich search and navigation within visual collections.
The workshop also allowed for an exchange on the challenges and opportunities related to integrating these technologies, notably in terms of data quality, acceptance by heritage professionals, and respect for ethical and environmental requirements.
Demo workshop “Awareness of AI tools”
(Studio D1)
This immersive workshop invites participants to discover the potential of generative artificial intelligence in a fun and interactive way. Led by Dorian Bardavid, Deputy to the Sub-director of projects and products at the Ministry of Culture (SNUM), it proposes learning how to “prompt” — that is, to formulate effective requests to guide AI in creating content.
On the program:
- AI-assisted image creation;
- Writing stunning automatically generated texts;
- Live experimentation to test, imagine, and marvel at AI’s creative capacities.
This workshop is intended for the curious as well as creatives or those who simply wish to better understand AI tools and their potential impact on digital and cultural practices. It highlights how AI can become a true partner in bringing ideas to life, while raising awareness of limits and ethical challenges.
Our conclusion
Between heritage exploration with HikarIA, critical reflection on models and their impact, and strategies for preserving human creation, the 2025 Forum provided a comprehensive overview of cultural issues related to artificial intelligence.
Far from being a simple fad, AI is now a structural component of the cultural ecosystem. However, it must be framed, understood, and used in the service of diversity, transparency, and creation.
Ultimately, this forum offers a new perspective on a debate often perceived as conflictual – AI versus culture – and paves the way for a fruitful coexistence, where artificial intelligence becomes an instrument of mediation, transmission, and promotion of cultural creation.
By Marie Pezé
