The European Writers' Council (EWC) has told the European Parliament that Europe's response to generative AI in the creative industries should not be an attempt to outbuild American and Chinese technology companies but a defence of the rights, remuneration and working conditions of the human writers whose work trains those systems.
In a submission published on 1 September 2026 and titled "Cultural and Creative Sectors in the Age of AI: EWC's Call for a Change in Europe's Mindset", the federation set out its position ahead of a stakeholder meeting with the Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education (CULT) on 2 September. The submission fed into CULT's own-initiative report on Cultural and Creative Sectors in the Age of AI, for which Portuguese MEP Hélder Sousa Silva—a CULT coordinator for the European People's Party—is rapporteur.
The core of the EWC's ask is the removal of the text-and-data-mining (TDM) exception under the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, which the federation argues was never intended to cover the training of generative AI models. In its place, the EWC wants entirely voluntary, individually negotiable licensing between authors and AI developers, with no substitute "AI exception" and no mandatory licensing scheme imposed on writers in its stead.
The federation frames the demand around what it calls the ART principle — authorisation, remuneration and transparency — arguing that none of the three currently applies in practice to the use of copyrighted books in AI training.
Beyond copyright, the submission calls for continuous, human-readable labelling of AI-generated content at every stage — from training data through to the point a reader encounters the finished text — so that readers, retail platforms, collecting societies and public funders can distinguish AI-generated material from human-authored work. The EWC argues that the AI Act's existing transparency template and watermarking provisions fall short of this, since watermarks can be stripped and the input-side documentation required of developers offers little practical means for authors to verify whether their work was used.
The submission asks the CULT Committee to press for a comprehensive EU-wide study into the economic harm generative AI has caused the book sector — covering lost licensing income, falling commissions for translators and illustrators, and knock-on effects on pension and tax contributions — and for job-creation and social-protection measures for writers and translators affected by the disruption. It also calls for a dedicated EU directive on the social protection of authors and other cultural professions, and for changes to EU competition law that would let authors' associations advise members collectively on contracts and remuneration without falling foul of competition rules.
On discoverability, the EWC wants MEPs to propose a rule for cultural works modelled on the Audiovisual Media Services Directive's requirement that on-demand platforms carry and give prominence to a minimum share of European content. The federation argues that recommendation algorithms and AI systems trained overwhelmingly on dominant world languages are marginalising smaller European languages and non-mainstream literary work.
The EWC's submission runs alongside, but is separate from, the European Commission's own call for evidence on an AI strategy for the cultural and creative sectors, which closes on 11 September 2026 and is expected to feed into a Commission strategy due in the first half of 2027. The Commission's process says it wants a strategy that ensures AI "complements, rather than replaces" human creativity while safeguarding cultural and linguistic diversity — a Parliament-led own-initiative report and a Commission-led sectoral strategy running on parallel but distinct tracks.
