Music to Whose Ears? Beauty for Whose Eyes? Economic and Societal Fairness in a Data-Driven Cultural and Creative Industry

  • Workshop
  • Music Room
  • Wednesday 21.05 — 14:15 - 15:30

Organising Institution

Uppsala University

Sweden

AI-generated illustrations. 3D models of cultural heritage. A song sung by a digital voice replica. An avatar imitating the gaming-style of a YouTuber. Who should reap the economic and cultural benefits of the datafied exploitation of creative works and performances? Currently the main public focus is on the opposing interests of large AI companies and artists struggling to protect their works from unlawful uses through intellectual property law. In this workshop we complicate this simple narrative by focusing on more actors, concerns, and legal frameworks. We discuss our Data4SCI ("An Empirical Perspective on Challenges and Opportunities of the European Data Act for SMEs in the Swedish Creative Industry") research project, engage with discussant prof. Wiggins and invite the audience to participate in a Legal Hackathon (15 min) and a roundtable discussion. We focus on three themes: (1) fairness (who should earn from datafied creativity?), (2) consent (for yet unknown future uses and implications), and (3) governance (what kind of intermediaries, standards, legal frameworks?).

Host

Andreas Kotsios

KTH Royal Institute of Technology/Uppsala University - Sweden

Associate Professor in Commercial Law at the Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University, focusing on AI regulation. Postdoctoral researcher in the research project "Data4SCI. An Empirical Perspective on Challenges and Opportunities of the European Data Act for SMEs in the Swedish Creative Industry" (2023-2025). Passionate about law and information technology. Currently doing research on AI regulation and data governance in the areas of medical treatment (Uppsala University) and the Swedish creative industries (KTH). Previous research includes legal issues related to the application of AI in financial markets. PhD in EU law with a thesis on the subject of "payments with personal data". LL.M. in Law and Information Technology from the University of Stockholm.

Host

Anna-Kaisa Kaila

KTH Royal Institute of Technology - Sweden

Anna-Kaisa Kaila is a musicologist (MA) and an economist (M. Sc. Econ.) specialised in the study of arts, communications and intellectual property. Currently, she is exploring socio-political effects of technology on creative and cultural sectors, the ethics and aesthetics of creative-AI, copyright applied to art, and the shifting narratives of creativity. Her interdisciplinary PhD project focuses on artificial intelligence and its unfolding social, ethical and legal implications on artist communities. In this project, she has developed tools for ethical analysis (EASE) to be used in the development of music AI applications, engaged with artists that use AI in their creative work, and provided critical analyses of generative AI music tools and artworks from the perspective of humanist and social sciences, and legal studies. The project is a part of the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanities and Society.

Host

Katja de Vries

Uppsala University - Sweden

Katja de Vries is an associate professor in public law at Uppsala University. She is also affiliated to the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute (Stockholm). Her current research focuses on the challenges that AI-generated content poses to data protection, intellectual property and other fields of law. Katja de Vries is the principle investigator/leader of the interdisciplinary research environment "VOICE. AI-created voices: legal and societal perspectives" (Swedish Research Council, 2025-30).

Host

Geraint Wiggins

Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Belgium

Geraint A. Wiggins studied Mathematics and Computer Science at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and holds PhDs from the University of Edinburgh’s Artificial Intelligence and Music Departments. His main research area is computational creativity, which he views as an intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He is interested in understanding how humans can be creative by building computational models of mental behaviour and comparing them with the behaviour of humans. He has worked at the University of Edinburgh and three colleges of the University of London: City (where he served as Head of Computing, and Senior Academic Advisor on Quality), Goldsmiths, and Queen Mary (where he served as Head of School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science). In 2018, he moved his Computational Creativity Lab to the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, in Belgium. He is a former chair of SSAISB, the UK learned society for AI and Cognitive Science, and of the international Association for Computational Creativity. He is a consulting editor of Music Perception (the journal of the Society for Music Perception) and an editorial board member of the Journal of New Music Research, and the Journal of Creative Music Systems.