What Might Be the Possible Conditions for Artificial Intelligence to Become Cultural Beings and to Develop a Cultural Heritage of Their Own?

As artificial intelligence (AI) as a technology becomes ever more pervasive in a wide range of human endeavor, from highly specialized technological and scientific applications to mass-market generative AI ‘consumed’ by the public, the question arises whether, over time, artificial intelligence could become cultural beings and, by extension, could develop a heritage of their own. This paper reopens a 2007 examination of whether future sentient robots, autonomous systems, or AI would possess culture, exercise cultural heritage and what conditions need to be met to reach that point. Based on two ‘conversations’ with two generative AI models, ChatGPT4.5 and DeepSeek R1, that examine the models’ ‘understanding’ of culture and heritage, we explored the various thematic and content connections these models make. This paper demonstrates the conditions, technological, attitudinal and societal that are required to allow for an AI culture to develop. That culture will look very different from that maintained by humans and will be based on very different, currently unknowable, value sets. This paper is novel, as it expands the conceptual framework of how we understand heritage from an anthropocentric perspective to one that includes non-human, ‘artificial’ intelligence now and in the future.