What does AI say about my work on… Cities | Events | Culture

A series of conversations with the algorithm

I invite you to explore a series of posts about the way AI interprets my lifelong work on cities, culture, major events & impact evaluation. I start with a link to a video summarising my research on Glasgow as a European pioneer of city branding techniques in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s

I cannot postpone it any further: it is June 2025, and I feel obliged to open the ‘chat’ everyone & their cat is now part of: ChatGPT.

It only makes sense to start such a strange form of conversation if this is about the work I know inside out: my own! Given my lack of understanding about these rapidly evolving tools, testing artificial intelligence’s capacity to interpret my 27-years of published content seems the only reasonable route to determine whether it can be of use for my current & future thinking needs.

Let’s call these thinking needs ‘intellectual development’… and forgive me for asking these obvious and perhaps naive questions:

Will AI stupidify me or help me advance my lines of thought?

Plenty of people in the humanities believe that the latter is feasible.
I will suspend disbelief.

So… if the topics appeal to you, I invite you to explore a series of posts about my lifelong interests and my life’s work. These posts have been authored by AI but have also been thoroughly edited by my very human brain.

The topics I propose to start with are quite broad:

  • What does AI say about my work on… CITIES
  • What does AI say about my work on… MAJOR EVENTS & FESTIVALS
  • What does AI say about my work on… CULTURAL OLYMPIADS
  • What does AI say about my work on… EUROPEAN CAPITALs OF CULTURE
  • What does AI say about my work on… CULTURAL IMPACT EVALUATION

Depending on how this experiment turns out, I may dig deeper on specific areas like…

  • What does AI say about my work on…
    • GRAND NARRATIVES
    • PLACE-MAKING
    • MYTH MAKING & MYTH MANAGEMENT
    • CULTURE-LED REGENERATION

I might also go on and interrogate the notes that inform my thinking but have never been published. The latter is work in progress and the outcome is not a given…

What happens if a person attempts to reawaken a very large, and long dormant, lifelong archive of their every interest and thought?

Will I recognise what the algorithm throws back at me?

How will it feel to engage with my 20something, my 30something or 40something year old selves?


This exercise is daunting and a bit disturbing, but I must admit that, after two years delaying it, I also feel immensely curious.

My good friend Prof Andy Miah got me started when he dropped one of my favourite slide presentations (on Glasgow’s pioneering approach to city branding, a paper I wrote in 2003) on Google NotebookLM. This translated into one of these fake podcasts, consisting of a dialogue between two Americanised voices (male and female) prone to hyperbolic expressions… As so many others before me, I was baffled, a tad shocked but also awed by the result.

In this particular (artificial) podcast there are basic mistakes that I do not know how to fix (ie. I cannot modify the automated ‘script’ generated by the algorithm and replace the reference to ‘Glasgow Smiles’ with the famous 1980s slogan: ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’). Despite this mishap, there are also some brilliant insights that summarise well what I was trying to say with these slides.

Naturally, I would be 3,000 times better as a podcaster than these two entities combined!! Just invite me to do one with you and you will see :)


For those of you interested in the technicalities behind how I am developing these artificial conversations (the sources I am choosing, the questions I am asking), drop me a comment or get in touch separately. I would be happy to run a discussion with peers – academics, artists, policymakers, strategists – about their own experiences talking to AI and dissecting the value of their own work through the lens of these rapidly evolving algorithms.


Who is in the hands of who? Who is learning faster – or deeper – or in more meaningful ways? Let it, please, be us, troubled messy beautiful humans.


Thanks to Andy Miah, Andrew Melchior, Asa Boxer and Can Erbil for valuable conversations, provocations and reading materials on this unavoidable | unsuppressable new world of learning, interpreting and communicating.

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