Generative AI is reshaping the cultural infrastructure through which knowledge is discovered, synthesized, and held accountable. Scholars and policymakers often turn to historical analogies such as the printing press, steam power, or electricity to make sense of this shift, yet these analogies usually fail to specify which property of the technology is being compared, leading to governance that targets the wrong system attribute. This paper introduces a diagnostic framework for analyzing how generative AI can transform epistemic and cultural practice. Each intervention is decomposed into three coordinates: the epistemic site where the technology acts, the governing logic that organizes its object, and the technical mechanism that instantiates the logic. The framework distinguishes structural cultural consequences that stem from the mechanism itself from contingent consequences that remain open to design and institutional choice. Applying the framework to information discovery and knowledge synthesis reveals specific cultural effects of the shift from indexicality to inference and from editorial authority to statistical consensus, and highlights governance levers that broader analogical views obscure.
Review