Artificial Intelligence and Contemporary Art

Artificial intelligence systems are trained on vast quantities of existing artworks, learning from them to generate new images that increasingly rival human artists in their apparent originality. The creative community is deeply divided over what this means. Some contemporary artists embrace AI as a tool for co-creation and want legislators to recognise and protect the intellectual property in works they make with its help. Others see their livelihoods under threat and are calling for a legal framework that defends their work, and their very business model, against systems built on it.

This session will look at how artists actually co-create with AI and at how courts in Europe and North America are positioning themselves on the two questions at the heart of the debate: who is recognised as the author of an AI-assisted work, and whether copyrighted works can lawfully be used to train algorithms. It will also ask a more provocative question: whether the existing framework of intellectual property is equipped to absorb a shift this profound, or whether more radical regulatory change will be needed to respond to a genuine paradigm shift in how art is made.

Additional information

Eva Soria Puig holds a PhD in Law and a doctoral thesis on Contemporary Art and Intellectual Property, with a cum laude honor from the Faculty of Law (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ​​2021). She also holds a BA in Art History (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ​​1997), a BA in Art Conservation (Palazzo Spinelli, Florence, 1995), and a JD (Golden Gate University, San Francisco, California, 2003), specializing in Intellectual Property and International Law.

She is currently the Director of the Cultural Sector at ICUB (Institut de Cultura, Barcelona City Council). With extensive experience in public management, she combines her work in the public sector with her teaching career as a professor of Intellectual Property at the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) and at IL3-UIB, in the Master’s Degree in Contemporary Art: Context, Mediation, and Management. She gives talks, lectures, and workshops on cultural management and copyright and is the author of the book “Contemporary Art and Copyright” (ed. Reus, 2023) and several articles. She is also a member of ALADDA (Literary and Artistic Association for the Defense of Copyright). She is currently researching the impact of AI on the legal framework of intellectual property and its consequences for contemporary creation.