Rent, Style and Automation: Generative AI in the Platformisation of Culture

The platformisation of society, how digital platforms reshape economic, social, and cultural life, has become a key topic in recent scholarship. Central to this process is the extraction of value through intermediation and the shaping of user behaviour by enabling certain actions while restricting others. This dynamic is particularly evident in the production and circulation of cultural content. With the rise of generative AI (Gen AI)—platforms specifically designed to produce cultural objects—and the stagnation of traditional platforms like social media and search engines, we must reconsider how platform affordances influence cultural production. In earlier work (Caliandro & Anselmi 2021), we argued that platforms like Instagram enable a “memetic logic” by standardizing content creation through visual formulas (e.g., selfies, outfits) that act as a communicative grammar. Platform power lies in balancing standardization with enough variation to sustain discourse.

This paper examines how this dynamic evolves with Gen AI. We analyse over 2 million Stable Diffusion prompts (2022) and nearly 1 million Midjourney prompts (2023) using natural language processing, thematic clustering, and TF-IDF. Our contribution is twofold: first, we offer a research protocol to study visual Gen AI outputs; second, we provide empirical evidence of platformisation at work in Gen AI. Our findings show that prompts cluster not by subject (e.g., cats, women) but around anchor keywords referencing styles or specific artists. This reveals Gen AI’s role in magnifying existing cultural trends and supports a broader theory of platformisation. Furthermore, Gen AI platforms emerge as monopolistic actors that facilitate rent-seeking in the cultural industry, reinforcing the logic of platform capitalism.

Guido Anselmi studies how digital platforms reshape culture, economics, and power. Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Catania, he teaches cultural, digital, and globalization sociology, and has devoted his research to platform capitalism, the imaginaries that sustain it, and the digital and computational methods applied to sociological inquiry. He is the author of two books: one on the political and epistemological implications of platforms, the other on the platformization of consumer culture. His current projects focus on the political economy of generative artificial intelligence and on the role of platform imaginaries as symbolic resources that consolidate their monopolistic power.

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