Irish Presidency of the Council of the European Union:

Copyright and Human Creativity in the Age of AI

From Input to Output: EWC demands a full transparent “Nutri-Score” for the AI value chain

A Dublin conference, Copyright and Human Creativity in the Age of AI, was organised as part of the Irish EU Presidency on Wednesday 14 October 2026 by NewsBrands Ireland and the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA). It resulted in a valuable combination of expertise and political perspective. The EWC, represented by its Board Member, the writer and historian Dr Conor Kostick, reminded the audience that only full transparency is key:

For the public good, the EU implemented laws requiring labelling to tell us what we are putting into our bodies. Well, we need the same laws to know what we are putting into our minds.”

An opening address by Eleonora Rosati said that despite the complexity arising from member states diverging in how they implement the relevant directives, “there is an appetite in the EU to regulate AI”.

Naoise O Cearúil, Chair of the Irish Oireachtas Committee on AI, said there should be stronger regulation of the obligation to reveal training data. Agnieszka Horak, of IFPI said that copyrighted content had been used by AI in music “to a very large extent”.

Henna Virkkunen, EU Executive Vice President for Tech Sovereignty said that the AI Act was in place and that the EU have started to enforce it. “We have sent requests for information from the tech companies that have not disclosed their training data.” She confirmed the principle that it is important that no one’s work should be used without compensation.

She stated that the text and data-mining exemption is not working and made the notable remark that, “We are not in the pockets of the big companies. We are enforcing our legislation.”

Harshvaardhan Pandit, from TCD’s AI Accountability Lab, reported on the results of analysing 80 ‘summaries’ from AI companies to the EU and said there was clear evidence of “a wilful exclusion of the requirement” by the bigger tech companies.

For the EWC Board Member Conor Kostick was asked for his priority and answered with the need for transparency: from the books used in training all the way through to the final product.

“It’s like the situation with food before proper labelling,” Conor Kostick said. “For the public good, the EU implemented laws requiring labelling to tell us what we are putting into our bodies. Well, we need the same laws to know what we are putting into our minds.”

 

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