To address the multifaceted intertwining between AI and the CCI, and to foster a sustainable, innovative environment, the following areas could contribute to this topic’s expected outcomes:

• Explore the impact of AI – including generative AI, and emerging AI systems – on CCI markets and audiences, ranging from individual artists and creators to processes, services, products, and consumer interactions.
• Investigate AI’s current and potential applications within CCI that enhance creativity, innovation, and competitiveness.
• Focus on AI integration in those cultural and creative industries where it is most disruptive or most needed to optimise processes and reap business opportunities, identifying key risks, changes in employment and job profiles, and the need for upskilling, reskilling, and capacity building.
• Develop a sound understanding of how the intersection of CCI and AI can drive innovation both within the CCI and across other sectors, promoting business processes that respect and promote cultural diversity, foster the discoverability of European content and protect and reward human creativity.
• Investigate the underexplored potential of creativity and the arts to engage with AI developments and collaborate with AI specialists and third parties when appropriate. This can aim to design trustworthy, ethical, user-friendly intelligent systems that meet people’s needs, enhance user experience, safeguard cultural diversity, address biases (including biases towards gender, sex, age, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, and migrant status) boost CCI’s competitiveness, and promote societal adoption of AI.
• Develop pilots, guidance, and innovative toolkits, including use cases, checklists, and algorithms, addressing CCI needs and values, cultural diversity, and the protection of intellectual property rights, including copyright and related rights.
• Facilitate interaction among artists and creatives, AI developers, cultural institutions, creative businesses, and third parties as appropriate, to promote knowledge transfer and enhance AI-powered innovation in CCI.
• Provide mechanisms or platforms for collaborations, peer learning, and knowledge sharing to build capacity and foster creativity-led innovation, while integrating humanistic perspectives into AI through dialogues that blend creativity and the arts with AI communities within research, policy, and practice.
• Assess the role cultural organisations can play in training AI systems in their areas of competence to represent multilingualism and cultural diversity in digital environments and to foster accessibility, and the extent to which AI contributes to their value creation, enhancing traditional methods and practices and personalising engagement with their public.
• Devise strategic recommendations for policies and practices that foster a mutually beneficial relationship between AI and CCI, propose fair rights management solutions and address employment, skills, and innovation challenges.

Proposals should involve from the outset representatives from the CCI, including the arts and cultural heritage, to ensure their central role in activity development. Proposals need not cover all CCI but may focus on a specific area for thorough analysis to develop a strong knowledge base and highlight strategic directions and routes to improvement.