Ambassador’s Voice | Yacine Aït Kaci

A pioneering digital artist, creator of Elyx, the United Nations' first virtual ambassador, and founder of the Electronic Shadow collective, Yacine Aït Kaci has been exploring the boundaries between art, technology and humanism for over 25 years. Ambassador of the We Are Human Festival, he sees in AI not a threat but a historic opportunity for creators: to reinvent their tools, expand the field of the possible, and reclaim control of their own creative space.

«AI has given us our superpowers back»: Yacine Aït Kaci, digital pioneer in the age of AI

 

There is an excitement in Yacine Aït Kaci's voice when he talks about artificial intelligence. Not the excitement of a recent convert, he has been working in digital since 1999, created the Louvre DVD-ROM, pioneered video mapping, and navigated every revolution the digital world has thrown up. No, this is an excitement of recognition. "It feels exactly the same as 25 years ago, when we were discovering Flash, JavaScript, Director. That feeling that anything is possible, that we are explorers, that no one knows better than us what we can do." AI, and in particular what he calls "vibe coding", that systemic approach that goes beyond the simple prompt to design entire workflows, has given back something that the years of digital industrialisation had progressively taken away from creators: the ability to design their own tools.

 

To illustrate this reversal, he reaches for a historical example: the paint tube. "The Impressionist painters would never have been able to go and paint en plein air, leave the studio, face to face with nature, if an American painter had not invented the paint tube. Because you had to be a painter to know you needed it." AI works in the same way: it creates nothing in place of the artist, but it gives back the capacity to invent one's own constraints, one's own formats, one's own spaces. His project Archipel, an immersive universe with images of 400 million pixels, a metaphor for a decentralised and multilateral world, is the concrete demonstration of this. Everything is designed, controlled, intentional. "AI never has the last word in my work. I am the director on my set. I have the final cut."

 

«The real divide is education»

 

But Yacine Aït Kaci is not naive. He knows that enthusiasm is not enough. The question he raises is that of education. "The real divide linked to AI is not cultural. It is intra-cultural. That is to say: within the same population, between those who know how to use the tool and those who do not." What we used to call the digital divide twenty years ago is back, in a more subtle form. Someone who asks ChatGPT a question the way they would do a Google search accesses only a fraction of what AI can produce. Someone who designs a workflow, who masters agentic AI, who knows how to formulate their intentions with precision, that person has an unprecedented creative power at their disposal. Between the two, there is a chasm. And that chasm is not dug by technology. It is dug by educational, social and cultural inequality that existed long before AI.

 

This observation, however, does not cast a shadow over him. Because AI has one characteristic unlike any tool he has known: "It is the first time we have had a tool capable of guiding you through its own use." And there is also this premium on raw talent, without networks, without family capital, that social media began to create and that AI will multiply many times over. "People who would never have had access to these means will be able to tell incredible stories, make extraordinary films, without Hollywood behind them." All it takes, he says, is not to be afraid. Because the fear of AI is, at its core, often the fear of being replaceable. And if you are replaceable, it is because the tasks you rely on are too.

 

«Elyx, We Are Human: one shared idea of the universal»

 

It is in this context that his commitment to the We Are Human Festival takes on its full meaning. Elyx, the character he created fifteen years ago and who became the United Nations' virtual ambassador, rests on a simple and radical idea: a non-verbal, universal language, without gender or origin, capable of crossing cultural boundaries where words fail. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been translated into 400 languages; Elyx needs none of them. "Elyx is a bridge between people who do not speak the same language but who share a common destiny." That is exactly what We Are Human seeks to do with AI: not to celebrate its power, but to direct it towards what unites us.

 

The festival's timeframe, 30 years, one article of the Declaration per edition, resonates deeply with his vision. "We are launching something now, and it is going to watch us grow old. That is a form of optimism." A lucid optimism, which does not ignore the knife-edge on which the world is balanced right now. The rise of nationalisms, the erosion of multilateralism, the assault on the most fundamental rights. It is precisely because this moment is fragile that the gesture carries meaning. "The Universal Declaration was only possible in the wake of the smoking ruins of the Second World War. We have no desire to go through that again." For Yacine Aït Kaci, creating with AI while carrying humanist values is not a contradiction. It is, on the contrary, the most necessary act: to seize the tool before others alone set the rules.