Artificial Intelligence and Contemporary Art

Artificial intelligence programmes use large amounts of data from existing artworks to generate new images that often challenge human artists in their originality. While some contemporary artists incorporate AI as a co-creation tool and call on legislators to protect the intellectual property of their works created with the help of AI, other members of the creative community perceive their work to be at risk and call for a legal framework to preserve their business model.

In the next two years, EU member states will have to incorporate the AIA (Artificial Intelligence Act) into their national legislation. Is there consensus among the artistic community? Is intellectual property law ready to incorporate the major revolution that AI represents for artists?

This session will explain how artists co-create with AI and how courts in Europe and North America are positioning themselves in cases involving recognition of authorship and the use of copyrighted works to train algorithms. It also proposes some radical regulatory changes that may be necessary to respond to this paradigm shift in creation.

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.