Open Future’s response to the Call for Evidence on the AI Strategy for the Cultural and Creative Sectors

Open Future has submitted a response to the European Commission’s call for evidence on the Artificial intelligence strategy for the cultural and creative sectors.

The call frames the role of these sectors as adopters of AI and providers of data. Our response argues that this definition is too narrow and proposes an additional role: the development and governance of public data infrastructure to make cultural data accessible to Europe’s public AI ecosystem. We refer to this as cultural sovereignty: as cultural resources are converted into proprietary data by non-European providers, Europe requires institutions that can maintain open, publicly governed infrastructure in the public interest.

This submission is based on our contribution to the Europeana Initiative’s Public AI white paper and supports Europeana’s own response to the Call for Evidence. Our feasibility study for a European Books Data Commons illustrates how this approach could be applied to one category of material: a shared, library-governed layer that makes millions of digitised public-domain books AI-ready on infrastructure controlled by the contributing institutions.