Conference Program

The connection between the values of western democracies and other autocratic systems is conditioned by an environment saturated with technological manipulation and pervaded by the ideology of disinformation. Disinformation today, helped by the still unregulated use of AI, exhibits specific aspects that impact the relationship between knowledge, education, and democracy.

Web information, characterized by speed and repeatability, produces an enormous amount of unverifiable and easily falsifiable content and news (fake news). Generative AI, through chatbots, provides its users with effective answers and texts tailored to their needs, resulting in significant linguistic effects: from lexical impoverishment, particularly seen in some experiential fields of knowledge, to epistemia, which is the impression of knowledge based on the uncritical acceptance of AI responses.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly present in various learning contexts and are used to obtain information or access knowledge across all fields. LLMs offer well-articulated answers with such formal accuracy that they lead the user to confuse linguistic form with epistemic reliability. Epistemia is, precisely, the illusion of knowledge that emerges when superficial plausibility replaces source verification, in-depth knowledge, and selection of informations. Delegating judgment to such systems can influence learning processes and negatively impact people's development in the context of democratic citizenship, accentuating systemic effects such as economic and cultural inequalities, social disparities, and political asymmetries.

The contemporary crisis is not only technological, socioeconomical, or political; it is, first and foremost, an epistemological crisis. Today, we have free access to a boundless amount of knowledge, but we don’t know how to appropriate it, how to manage it. In the constant flow of web communications, it becomes essential to develop the skills of organization and connection of knowledge.

AI can communicate anything without having experience and knowledge of it. Education today must take on the following tasks: rethink the lexicon of knowledge; defend the possibility of experiencing knowledge in a world that replaces it with its linear description; build awareness of the significant losses that are reducing the lexicon linked to experience and cultivate semantic capital (Floridi).

To rebuild the relationship between democracy and education it is important to place the individual at the center of the educational process, their corporeity, their unpredictable and nonlinear thinking, the complexity of their understanding of the world through experience. Culture and especially art can be considered pedagogical tools aimed at fostering the values of social cohesion and equity.

This perspective opens a reflection about the use of AI in education, placing the experiential value of knowledge at the center, and thus recognizing the individual's active role in a complex relationship of hybridization between culture, pedagogy, and technology. Learning about the role of art and of the experience of art is important to promote the empowerment of critical thinking and the epistemic responsibility of students and teachers to reach a democratic school.