Press release: European regulation on artificial intelligence: Culture and copyright must not be forgotten

As the examination of the draft European regulation on artificial intelligence (AI) draws to a close, the French Coalition for Cultural Diversity is calling on France to speak out strongly in favour of regulation that truly protects creation, copyright and related rights.
The recent announcements by the Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, creating a mission within the Strategic Council for Artificial Intelligence, intended in particular to ensure the protection of copyright and related rights, to promote French and French-speaking cultural assets and to measure the impacts of AI on creative professions and on the value chain are encouraging in this respect.
This positive commitment from the minister is all the more essential given that the deployment of AI will have to be combined with the adoption, in France as in Europe, of new regulatory measures to preserve copyright, an essential tool of cultural exception, and to support human creation.
To be effective and coherent, France’s proactive approach to supporting the development of AI without weakening human creativity or undermining copyright must also be expressed in Europe.
On the occasion of the parliamentary work already underway on the draft regulation on AI, MEPs have introduced two minimum measures that are useful for the transparent use of works by artificial intelligence. Upstream, AI providers would be required to publish a summary of the copyrighted training data used, and downstream, they would have to inform users in a clear and intelligible manner that they are interacting with an AI.
Not only should these measures be maintained, but the obligation of upstream transparency should even be strengthened in order to allow for the precise identification of all the works used to train the AIs. Indeed, to date, the films, images, texts and pieces of music used in databases are often used without the authorisation of the rights holders and with no regard for their rights.
The definitive adoption of transparency measures, as part of the trialogue between the Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of the European Union, is the minimum that we can expect from this first step towards the regulation of AI. However, such regulation is essential to guarantee the virtuous and ethical development of AI and to prevent cultural issues from being purely and simply forgotten by European regulation, as they were originally.
France has always been at the forefront of ambitious positions to protect artistic creation and copyright in Europe. The French Coalition therefore calls for this course to be maintained by asking the government to send a clear message within the Council of the EU and in the ongoing trilogues in favour of the protection of creation, copyright and related rights, and transparency in the exploitation of works.
France’s failure to defend minimum rules of transparency and protection of intellectual property in the European regulation would not be acceptable.