# Large AI models are cultural and social technologies **Abstract:** ing subtle and nonobvious patterns in texts and images. This suggests that such technologies could be used to find patterns in text and images that crisscross the space of human knowledge and culture, including patterns invisible to any particular human. We may require new systems that diversify large model reflections and personas and produce the same distribution and diversity as do human societies. Diversifying systems like this might be particularly important for scientific progress. Formal science itself depended on the emergence of the new cultural technologies of the 17th and 18th centuries, from coffee houses and rapid mail to journals and peer review. AI technologies have the potential to accelerate science further, but this will depend on imaginative ways of using and rethinking these technologies. By wiring together so many perspectives across text, audio, and images, large models may allow us to discover unprecedented connections between them for the benefit of science and society. These technologies have most commonly been trained to regurgitate routine information as helpful assistants. A more fundamental set of possibilities might open up if we deployed them as maps to explore formerly uncharted territory. There are also less obvious and more interesting ways that new cultural and social technologies influence economic relationships. The development of cultural technologies leads to a fundamental economic tension between the people who produce information and t **Authors:** [[Farrell et al 2025]]