Testimony Without a Witness: Generative Artificial Intelligence and Regimes of Place Attestation in Digital Culture

The study examines regimes of place attestation in digital culture, understood as cultural mechanisms that establish trust in statements about geographical locations. It describes a paradox produced by generative systems: a synthetic statement about a place may appear no less credible than an eyewitness account, while disclosure of its artificial origin can undermine trust regardless of factual accuracy. The empirical material comprises two Russian cases from 2025–2026: the generative attribution of a tourist experience that never occurred to a Russian author-tour company, and the distribution of recommendations for Russian destinations in seven generative services. The framework combines theoretical cultural studies with the theory of the photographic image, the concept of the pseudo-event, the theory of the tourist sight and its marker, the semiotics of culture, and the philosophy of the digital object. Cultural-historical, comparative, and case-study methods are employed. The study introduces the concept of the warrant as an institutionally secured connection between a statement about a place and the subject answerable for its credibility. Three successive forms are identified: the warrant of the trace, the warrant of the eyewitness, and the warrant of distribution. Generative systems are shown to produce testimony without a witness: a complete form of attestation created without an act of witnessing and without an identifiable addressee of responsibility. The analysis distinguishes semiotic, deontic, and ontological registers and demonstrates that their conflation produces the misleading opposition between truth and falsification. Authenticity in digital culture consequently becomes an attribution of origin rather than an inherent property of the message. This gives rise to a distinct cultural activity termed the labour of attestation. For Russian tourist culture, in which knowledge of remote territories is predominantly mediated, the rupture of the warrant is therefore a cultural rather than merely technical problem.