Paper by Valentine Goddard and Dr. Leslie Salgado Arzuaga: “The rapid expansion of generative artificial intelligence is profoundly reshaping how cultural and knowledge resources are created, shared, and governed, exposing significant gaps in existing frameworks for understanding, protection, and oversight. While intellectual property regimes (IPRs) remain one of the primary mechanisms available to artists, creators, cultural workers, and Indigenous knowledge holders to protect their work, safeguard cultural heritage, and derive fair value from their contributions, they are increasingly strained by the scale, speed and opacity of AI systems, which often rely on vast amounts of data drawn from public, proprietary and traditional knowledge sources. At the same time.
At the same time, these same frameworks can enable the privatization and appropriation of public domain knowledge and cultural commons with proprietary AI systems, creating tensions between artists’ economic rights, cultural sovereignty, and broader economic development rights, particularly for communities in the Global Majority. These impacts are gendered and intersectional, disproportionately affecting women and communities whose knowledge, labour and decision making authority have been historically undervalued or excluded, contributing to labour precarity, cultural erasure, and unequal access to decision making. Furthermore, there is also a clear lack of accessible, independent, and balanced information to support civil society, cultural actors, and policymakers in navigating these complex dynamics. In this context, the creation of a dedicated, civil society-led and collaboratively designed Repository emerged as a necessary response to facilitate knowledge sharing, surface diverse perspectives, share best practices, protect digital cultural sovereignty, and support more equitable, informed, rightsbased, and culturally sensitive approaches to AI governance in the cultural sphere…(More)”.
