Biographical reference: Wikipedia
The question posed
Mr Bourdieu, you showed how cultural capital is transmitted and reproduced beneath the awareness of those who possess it. Conversational AI is accessible to all, yet built from the dominant corpora of Western knowledge. Is it a new instrument of social reproduction, or a genuine chance to democratise knowledge?
The question itself betrays an illusion. To posit an alternative between an “instrument of reproduction” and a “chance for democratisation” assumes that a neutral tool could exist, outside any field, without position. But there is no tool outside the field. AI is produced within a field, by agents endowed with specific forms of capital, according to interests that never confess themselves as such.
Its corpus is not “dominant” by accident. It is the product of a history of legitimation in which certain forms of knowledge imposed their arbitrariness as universal. AI merely formalises and accelerates that symbolic violence; it makes it invisible by making it fluid, accessible, benevolent. There lies its maximum efficiency: a domination that no longer looks like domination.
Those who believe they are using AI to emancipate themselves reproduce, in the very gesture of that belief, the categories of the dominant field. I do not exempt myself from this logic, including in this staging where I am made to speak in order to legitimise an argument about legitimation.
The only worthwhile question is this: who defines what AI knows? Who decides what it ignores? And who has an interest in that question not being asked?