TITLE:
The Shift and Reflection of Cognitive Subjects in Cultural Heritage Preservation within the Era of Artificial Intelligence
AUTHORS:
Hengyang Fu
KEYWORDS:
Artificial Intelligence, Cultural Inheritance, Cognitive Subject, Subject Shift
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.7,
July
27,
2026
ABSTRACT: Artificial intelligence is profoundly reshaping the cognitive landscape of cultural heritage inheritance, bringing about a structural “shift of cognitive subjects” in the traditional human-centered cultural cognitive model. This shift manifests itself in four dimensions: the transfer of cognitive dominance from “human active interpretation” to “algorithmic passive content feeding”; the surrender of interpretive power from “humanistic value construction” to “technical data deconstruction”; the transformation of aesthetic authority from “subjective aesthetic self-awareness” to “machine aesthetic conditioning”; and the evolution of memory ownership from “intergenerational human memory” to “digital storage memory”. Its formative mechanisms lie in the following aspects: paradigm-based production of AIGC weakens individual cognitive creativity; algorithmic traffic logic reshapes cognitive orientation; human cognitive inertia and technological dependence accelerate the surrender of subjectivity; and digital cultural projects prioritize “formal replication” over “cognitive inheritance”. These factors consequently give rise to dilemmas including cognitive homogenization, superficial cognition, hollowing of human subjectivity, and sluggish cultural innovation. The countermeasures involve establishing a cognitive order of “humans as the primary agents and machines as auxiliary tools”, constructing an in-depth cognitive model of “human-machine complementarity”, and consolidating the subjective foundation of cultural inheritance in the intelligent era.