On the cultural and creative sectors in the age of AI

(2025/2180(INI))

The European Parliament,

–having regard to Article 167 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union,

–having regard to the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, adopted on 20 October 2005,

–having regard to Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence and amending Regulations (EC) No 300/2008, (EU) No 167/2013, (EU) No 168/2013, (EU) 2018/858, (EU) 2018/1139 and (EU) 2019/2144 and Directives 2014/90/EU, (EU) 2016/797 and (EU) 2020/1828 (Artificial Intelligence Act)1,

–having regard to the Commission proposal of 19 November 2025 for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Regulations (EU) 2024/1689 and (EU) 2018/1139 as regards the simplification of the implementation of harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Digital Omnibus on AI) (COM(2025)0836),

–having regard to Directive 2010/13/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 10 March 2010 on the coordination of certain provisions laid down by law, regulation or administrative action in Member States concerning the provision of audiovisual media services (Audiovisual Media Services Directive)2, as amended by Directive (EU) 2018/1808 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 November 2018 amending Directive 2010/13/EU on the coordination of certain provisions laid down by law, regulation or administrative action in Member States concerning the provision of audiovisual media services (Audiovisual Media Services Directive) in view of changing market realities3,

–having regard to Regulation (EU) 2021/818 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 May 2021 establishing the Creative Europe Programme (2021 to 2027) and repealing Regulation (EU) No 1295/20134,

–having regard to Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 September 2022 on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector and amending Directives (EU) 2019/1937 and (EU) 2020/1828 (Digital Markets Act)5,

–having regard to Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market For Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (Digital Services Act)6,

–having regard to Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market and amending Directives 96/9/EC and 2001/29/EC7,

–having regard to Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society8,

–having regard to its resolution of 10 March 2026 on copyright and generative artificial intelligence – opportunities and challenges9,

–having regard to the Commission proposal of 16 July 2025 for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing the ‘AgoraEU’ programme for the period 2028-2034, and repealing Regulations (EU) 2021/692 and (EU) 2021/818 (COM(2025)0550),

–having regard to the Commission communication of 8 October 2025 entitled ‘Apply AI Strategy’ (COM(2025)0723),

–having regard to its resolution of 17 January 2024 on cultural diversity and the conditions for authors in the European music streaming market10,

–having regard to its resolution of 3 May 2022 on artificial intelligence in a digital age11,

–having regard to its resolution of 20 October 2021 on the situation of artists and the cultural recovery in the EU12,

–having regard to its resolution of 19 May 2021 on artificial intelligence in education, culture and the audiovisual sector13,

–having regard to its resolution of 20 October 2020 on intellectual property rights for the development of artificial intelligence technologies14,

–having regard to Rule 55 of its Rules of Procedure,

–having regard to the report of the Committee on Culture and Education (A10-0000/2026),

A.whereas artificial intelligence (AI) is already used across the cultural and creative sectors (CCS), including in creation, production, distribution and discoverability;

B.whereas AI technologies are evolving faster than existing regulatory and market responses, continually giving rise to new applications, risks and challenges for the CCS that are difficult to anticipate and that call for a robust, technological, neutral assessment of the adequacy of the EU framework;

C.whereas AI can contribute to safeguarding tangible and intangible cultural heritage by supporting efforts to combat illicit trafficking of cultural goods and through digital preservation, authorship attribution, and the transcription and documentation of endangered oral traditions and performance practices;

D.whereas the opportunities and challenges arising from AI vary significantly across the different CCS, including the music, audiovisual, book, publishing, cultural heritage and news media sectors, requiring tailored sector-specific responses alongside horizontal measures;

E.whereas the proliferation of AI-powered tools raises serious concerns related to deepfakes, manipulation and fraud, which may undermine public confidence in cultural and creative content;

F.whereas automated programs that systematically browse websites and collect the content they find, known as web crawlers, scrapers or bots, are widely used both to develop the datasets on which generative AI models are trained and to retrieve content in real time in response to user queries; whereas website operators and rights holders can, at present, only restrict such collection through voluntary technical protocols, notably the robots exclusion protocol, which crawlers are under no obligation to respect; whereas rights holders frequently cannot establish which crawlers have visited their sites, on whose behalf they were acting or for what purpose the content was collected; whereas reservations of rights, therefore, can be neither verified nor enforced in practice;

G.whereas the European book and publishing sector, which has an estimated market value of EUR 39 billion, is seeing AI-driven innovation, including text-to-speech tools to improve accessibility for persons with print disabilities and predictive analytics to align print runs with demand and reduce overproduction;

H.whereas documented practices associated with the development of AI systems have involved the destructive digitisation of physical cultural material, including the dismantling, cutting or alteration of original works and copies in order to render their content machine-readable; whereas the development and deployment of AI must not result in the irreversible destruction, degradation or loss of tangible cultural works, collections or heritage assets; whereas digitisation for AI-related purposes should be carried out in a manner that safeguards the integrity, preservation and continued accessibility of the original material for future generations;

I.whereas the European audiovisual market generated revenues of around EUR 142 billion in 2024 and is increasingly deploying AI across its value chain from development and production to distribution;

J.whereas recorded music revenues in the EU reached EUR 5.7 billion in 2024, with paid streaming accounting for 77.4 % of revenue growth, and streaming services increasingly using AI-driven recommendation systems that affect artists’ discoverability and listeners’ access to new music;

K.whereas the integration of AI is altering the work dynamics in the CCS, including content creation and editing, which may reduce entry-level opportunities through the automation of tasks, thereby requiring the development of new skills and reshaping career pathways;

L.whereas AI technologies make it increasingly possible to replicate the voice, image and likeness of performers and other creators without their knowledge or consent, raising serious concerns about personality rights, economic interests and artistic integrity, which are not comprehensively addressed under the existing EU legal framework;

M.whereas news media and journalism face specific AI-related challenges, including risks to media pluralism, editorial integrity, economic sustainability and the disintermediation of publishers from their audiences as AI-powered answer engines can satisfy users’ information needs, without direct access to original journalistic content;

N.whereas the development of generative AI (GenAI) relies on vast amounts of data, including cultural and creative content used as training data, raising structural questions concerning the conditions for rights holders’ authorisation and control over such use, the transparency and traceability of training datasets, the identification and attribution of works and rights holders, remuneration and the distribution of value and bargaining power across the value chain;

O.whereas AI can widen public access to cultural heritage, including through virtual and immersive tours, interactive guides and improved accessibility for persons with disabilities, allowing more people to engage with collections and sites irrespective of their location; whereas such applications also carry risks, in particular where AI-generated reconstructions and interpretations are presented without a clear indication of their interpretative or hypothetical character, where digital experiences come to be treated as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, direct contact with authentic works and sites, and where cultural heritage institutions lose control over the digitised representations of their own collections;

P.whereas AI is already used in video game development for content creation, animation, sound and music, natural-language processing, quality control, testing and online safety, including the moderation of player communications and the detection of toxic behaviour; whereas it has potential to automate repetitive tasks, improve development workflows, support safer online experiences and enhance the player experience;

A coherent approach to AI in the CCS

1.Stresses that the ethical and human-centred use of AI can support and enhance, rather than replace, human creativity and can create opportunities across the creative and cultural value chain, from research and creative development to production, distribution and monetisation;

2.Acknowledges that AI plays distinct roles across the CCS, supporting the creation of works, the promotion, distribution and discoverability of content, and the emergence of new forms of artistic and creative expression;

3.Calls on the Commission to ensure that the announced AI strategy for the CCS is ambitious, delivered without delay, accompanied by a clear implementation roadmap and measurable sector-specific objectives, and developed in close consultation with creators, performers, cultural institutions, small and medium-sized enterprises, technology providers and the consumer; stresses that the strategy should foster innovation, competitiveness, human creation, cultural diversity, the discoverability of European works and wide public access to culture;

Innovation and artist empowerment in the EU

4.Emphasises that AI-driven tools can enhance the discoverability of European cultural and creative content, increase the universal visibility of artists and creators and support more diverse cultural consumption;

5.Recognises that AI-enabled tools can lower barriers to entry, enabling independent creators and smaller cultural and creative enterprises to use capabilities that previously required substantial technical and financial resources, thereby contributing to a greater diversity of European cultural content;

6.Calls on the Commission to assess the real impact of AI on the job opportunities and income of authors and performers across the CCS and to evaluate, as part of the upcoming AI strategy for CCS, AI literacy and upskilling needs across these sectors, thus ensuring that AI supports, rather than replaces, human creativity;

Fairness and sustainability of the cultural value chain

7.Stresses that transparency, respect for exclusive rights, contractual freedom, informed and voluntary licensing, clear liability rules and the effective enforcement of existing legislation are essential to enable rights holders to authorise or prohibit the use of their works and provide the necessary flexibility to foster a sustainable and innovative creative economy;

8.Calls for the full, consistent and effective implementation and enforcement of the AI Act’s transparency obligations for AI-generated and manipulated content, taking due account of the related Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content; calls on the Commission not to limit its response to the application of the existing horizontal legal framework, but to take further action at EU level to address the specific challenges arising from the use of AI in the CCS; considers that such action should complement the existing EU framework through targeted, sector-specific measures that safeguard human creativity, ensure meaningful transparency and accountability throughout the AI value chain, protect the diversity and visibility of European cultural and creative works, and preserve the conditions necessary for sustainable creative careers and a diverse European cultural ecosystem;

9.Acknowledges that algorithmic recommendation systems have an increasing influence on visibility, which may create challenges, including, but not limited to, the suppression of emerging, independent or minority-language creators and the opaque prioritisation of certain works; calls on the Commission to ensure the effective enforcement of existing obligations and evaluate the need for further measures to safeguard discoverability and exposure to European works;

10.Invites the Commission to assess the feasibility of a mandatory identification and registration mechanism for web crawlers used for AI training or data exploitation, in order to enable effective oversight, enhance transparency, thus allowing for increased understanding of cultural representation, and ensure accountability throughout their data-collection and processing activities;

11.Calls for standardised, machine-readable formats, potentially managed and listed by the European Union Intellectual Property Office, enabling rights holders to exclude their works from AI training, which would provide legal certainty for rights holders and AI providers;

12.Calls for EU safeguards protecting performers and other creators from the unauthorised replication of their voice, image or likeness by AI systems, and for accessible and effective remedies;

13.Recalls that Article 50 of the AI Act creates marking and disclosure obligations for the providers and deployers of AI systems generating synthetic content, but that those obligations do not follow the content along the chain through which it reaches the public; calls, therefore, for these obligations to be complemented by requirements for distributors, aggregators and platform operators to preserve and clearly display markings and provenance information, and for the development of common, workable and technologically neutral criteria to give practical effect to the boundary between AI generation and meaningful human creative input, with proportionate implementation for small and medium-sized enterprises; calls for platforms to make available the possibility of self-labelling fully AI-generated content at the point of delivery by creators, and for distributors to apply and enforce consistent and transparent policies to that effect;

14.Calls for fair remuneration and effective value distribution for rights holders whose works are used in AI systems, and for meaningful transparency, including on training data, to enable rights holders to exercise their rights and obtain remuneration; to that end, calls on the Commission to strengthen the Model Documentation Form under the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice by improving the traceability of the origin, composition and licensing status of training data and to revise, without delay, the Commission Template for the Public Summary of Training Content, required under Article 53(1)(d) of the AI Act, so that public summaries enable rights holders to identify relevant training data sources and effectively exercise and enforce their rights;

Sector-specific challenges, risks and opportunities in the age of AI

15.Calls on the Commission and the Member States to complement horizontal AI and copyright rules with tailored sector-specific policies and support measures addressing the distinct realities of the music, audiovisual, book and publishing, cultural heritage and news media sectors;

Music

16.Recognises that AI tools can enhance the discoverability of European music and connect listeners with new artists; reminds the Commission of the request made by Parliament, in its resolution on cultural diversity and the conditions for authors in the European music streaming market, for action to be taken at EU level to guarantee the visibility and accessibility of European musical works, considering the overwhelming, and constantly growing, amount of content on music streaming platforms and the lack of EU rules to regulate these streaming platforms in a harmonised manner;

17.Calls for all fully AI-generated tracks on streaming platforms to carry a clear and visible label and for this to be done in a timely manner, regardless of whether the tracks qualify as deepfakes; calls for platforms to be required to ensure that such labelling is consistently displayed and effectively enforced on their services;

18.Calls on platforms to take effective action against infringing content and streaming fraud, by excluding notably fraudulent streams from monetisation and revenue-allocation mechanisms; calls for meaningful aggregate reporting on anti-fraud measures and their results, cooperation with rights holders and competent authorities, and accessible appeal procedures for affected artists, labels and distributors;

Audiovisual and video games sectors

19.Recognises AI’s contribution across the audiovisual value chain, from pre-production to distribution; is concerned that performers face pressure to grant broad and open-ended rights for AI training and for the creation and exploitation of digital replicas and synthetic performances, notably in dubbing and video games;

20.Recognises that AI can support audiovisual creation and production, including documentary research, pre-visualisation, editing, visual effects, restoration, translation, dubbing and localisation; stresses that legitimate AI-assisted uses that support and enhance human creativity must be distinguished from the unauthorised use of protected films, programmes and archive material for AI training or in AI-generated outputs;

21.Calls on the Commission, to clarify the application of the current EU legal framework to player-generated content created through generative AI tools provided or integrated by games companies, particularly where such content infringes third-party rights or may affect a publisher’s ability to rely on existing hosting protections; stresses that any guidance should ensure legal certainty and avoid disproportionate obligations;

Book and publishing sectors

22.Recognises AI’s contribution to accessibility, including through text-to-speech tools for persons with print disabilities; is concerned by the unauthorised and exploitative large-scale use of copyright-protected books for AI training where such authorisation is required under EU law, and by the proliferation of unlabelled, fully AI-generated books, including publications attributed to fictitious human authors, which may mislead readers;

23.Calls on the Commission, following the initial application of Article 50 of the AI Act, to assess the effectiveness, interoperability, robustness and reliability of the machine-readable marking, detection and labelling requirements for synthetic text used in publications, which are to be extended beyond AI developers to online booksellers, distributors and self-publishing platforms; calls on those intermediaries to provide clear labelling and filtering mechanisms for fully AI-generated publications and to take effective action against unlawful use of content, AI-generated imitations and misleading attribution involving identifiable authors;

Advancing Europe’s cultural heritage through AI

24.Recognises the growing role of AI in the restoration, virtual reconstruction, preservation and accessibility of cultural heritage; warns that AI systems used to describe, curate and facilitate access to digital cultural heritage may reproduce or amplify biases in datasets and metadata, thereby reducing the visibility of under-represented collections, minority languages and less-represented cultures;

25.Stresses the need to support the responsible uptake of AI by museums and other cultural institutions, accompanied by adequate funding, capacity building and human oversight; warns that large-scale AI models and recommender systems may contribute to cultural homogenisation and reduce the visibility and discoverability of European works, minority-language content and less-represented cultures;

26.Calls for common EU standards and guidance on metadata quality, AI ethics, intellectual property and data governance in cultural heritage, including on the clear identification of AI-generated reconstructions and interpretations and on preserving the control of cultural heritage institutions over the digitised representations of their collections, with a view to facilitating broader access and research while fostering diversity and creativity across Europe;

27.Calls for investment in the development and curation of high-quality, rights-compliant and culturally and linguistically diverse datasets, with particular attention to under-represented European languages and cultures; calls on the Commission to develop methodologies and indicators to assess the representation of European cultural and linguistic diversity in AI training datasets;

News and journalism

28.Notes with concern the acute AI-related challenges facing news media and journalism, including risks to media pluralism, editorial integrity and economic sustainability, as AI systems increasingly retrieve and synthesise journalistic content within their own interfaces, often without adequate attribution or prominent links to the original sources, thereby disintermediating newsrooms and their editorial rigour from their audiences;

29.Calls on the Commission to ensure effective and continuous enforcement of obligations for very large online search engines under the Digital Services Act, specifically in relation to AI-generated overviews; calls for meaningful transparency regarding the selection of these sources and clear attribution and prominent links to original sources, thus potentially reducing the spread of misinformation;

30.Calls on providers of AI systems and services that base their training on retrieved journalistic content to comply with the applicable EU legal framework; supports voluntary, market-based licensing and fair remuneration where applicable; asks the Commission to address the practical situation whereby publishers may lose control and remuneration if they permit access to their content, but may lose visibility in general searches if they reserve their rights;

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31.Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Council and the Commission.