Artificial intelligence

AI is transforming the cultural and creative industries, offering both new possibilities and challenges.

Watch the video below to find out how generative AI works, how creators are using it, and what the risk factors are for European culture and creativity.

Together with 23 other creators and rightsholder organisations, on October 29, 2024, GESAC sent a letter to European policy makers urging them to ensure the AI Act is effectively implemented, protecting and promoting European Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs).

The letter restates rightsholders’ support for the aims laid out in the AI Act, adopted during the last EU term, but calls for a swift and faithful implementation measures to ensure the legislation is effect.

“We are contending with the seriously detrimental situation of generative AI companies taking our content without authorisation on an industrial scale in order to develop their AI models. Their actions result in illegal commercial gains and unfair competitive advantages for their AI models, services, and products, in violation of European copyright laws.”

Read the letter here

Read GESAC’s full reaction to the European Parliament’s vote in favor of including Generative AI systems and requiring them to respect copyright is significant here.

GESAC has co-signed an open letter calling for meaningful obligations on AI systems to ensure the lawful use of copyright-protected content.

The European Parliament proposes to oblige AI providers to record the data used to train AI, including material protected under copyright law, and to make this available in a sufficiently detailed way for rightholders to identify and enforce their rights.

In the joint letter, the rightholders coalition is asking three key improvements to the text:

• Making sure that the use of protected content for the design and development of AI models requires creators/rightholders’ consent.
• Improving the transparency obligations introduced in the European Parliament text and adding a provision of ‘shift of burden of proof’ or ‘presumption of usage’ when there isn’t sufficient transparency.
• Extraterritorial application of EU laws so that wherever the development or training process takes place, the EU rules (hence the need for authorization) should be required from the AI systems that are available to consumers in the EU.

Read the full letter here.