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A newspaper cutout from a 1930s newspaper against recorded music in cinemas. The name of the project is on the front, stating 'New Horizon project.'

EAiCCI | Shaping AI for the Cultural and Creative Industries

Ongoing project

September, 2026 - September, 2029

Artificial intelligence has become a defining force in Europe, shaping societies, culture, and public debate while testing the Union’s commitment to democracy, diversity, and sustainability. Artists and cultural professionals, policymakers, and higher arts education face opaque systems, legal uncertainty, market concentration among many growing challenges presented by AI. The EAiCCI project responds with a European-by-design AI Commons serving creative practice and public value in line with the values of the cultural ecosystem.

EAiCCI advances transparent and values-aligned AI by mapping the realities and futures of AI in the sector, strengthening critical AI literacy, developing alternative European technologies, and connecting communities to build lasting capacity. These aims operate synergistically: knowledge generation informs learning materials and tools, which enable collaboration and exchange, in turn generating new knowledge. All objectives are implemented at the European level and measured against their contribution to values-based outcomes, including:

  • Mapping Realities and Futures for European AI: Sound decisions require evidence and vision. EAiCCI builds a European corpus on the current state, concrete plans, and imagined futures of AI. Theoretical, investigative, speculative, and artistic research, complemented by interviews across Europe, captures not only facts but values and visions. The corpus informs European AI strategies and opens alternative pathways.
  • Strengthening European critical AI Literacy: To support agency across the cultural and creative sectors, the project translates the corpus into guides, learning materials, scenarios, artworks, and policy recommendations, with artistic exploration and storytelling as modes of inquiry embraced in their own right. This strives to equip creatives, researchers, and policymakers to actively shape European AI.
  • Alternative European AI Technologies: Rather than competing on data scale, where legality and transparency are hard to guarantee, EAiCCI works with small-data approaches. The project researches and develops European alternatives built on ethical data collection and models trained and adapted, with tools for content creation, knowledge sharing, and archiving. All developments comply with the AI Act and the Data Governance Act, follow FAIR principles, and reflect European cultural values.
  • Collaboration and Capacity Enhancement: Strengthening existing communities, EAiCCI activates European networks and infrastructures and channels its outputs through them. It acts as a catalyst for discourse and mutual learning among artists, technologists, and policymakers, positions institutions of higher arts education as drivers of critical, value-based AI innovation, and reinforces Europe’s leadership in human-centric AI.

In the long term, we aim to support European AI alternatives grounded in cultural diversity and democracy that counterbalance the dominance of big tech and safeguard our values.

We place the present realities and future possibilities of AI in Europe at the centre of dialogue among artists and cultural professionals, policymakers, and all those interested. By developing new knowledge, methods, and tools for a sovereign AI Commons, we empower communities in the fair, ethical and creative use of AI, grounded in democratic values and cultural diversity. 

Partners in the EAiCCI project

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Funded by the European Union accompanied with a EU flag.

 

 

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