Abstract

Cultural techniques are often operational procedures associated with media in-novations to deal with things or symbols that open up new possibilities for per-ception, cognition, and communication. Has contemporary artificial intelligence based on deep learning become a cultural technique? The essay argues that in the transition from alphanumeric to digital literacy, the ‘cultural technique of flattening’ creates the link between print culture and the generative or synthetic data processing of AI. An embryonic form of digitality al-ready existed before the use of computers. However, this presupposes that arti ficial flatness in the form of writing, pictures, diagrams, maps, etc. is recognised as a creative, collective ‘craft of the mind,’ without which complex individual cognition would have been virtually impossible even in earlier eras.