Case study: CulturAI

Shaping the Future of Creative Sovereignty

The rapid integration of AI into the cultural sector has moved from a distant concept to a daily reality for artists, writers, and curators. While these tools offer new efficiencies, they also pose significant risks to authorship, labour conditions, and cultural diversity.

To address this, Monash University has joined CulturAI, an ambitious Horizon Europe funded initiative designed to ensure human creativity and fair working conditions remain at the heart of cultural production.

Connecting Monash with Europe

MUERF brings Monash's Asia-Pacific perspectives and expertise in cultural policy and responsible AI to this high-impact European consortia. By partnering with Monash, this consortium gains specialised insights into creative autonomy and labour resilience, enriching the proposal with global perspective. Together, we can advance Europe’s leadership in ethical, culturally grounded AI governance and develop frameworks deeply aligned with foundational European values of diversity, pluralism, and freedom of expression.

Monash expertise in action

The CulturAI consortium was purposefully assembled over 12 months, with Monash and MUERF playing a decisive convening role in mapping partners and shaping the project’s methodological spine, and then delivering on research outcomes.Monash University contributes a concentrated pool of internationally recognised expertise in cultural policy, creative AI, and participatory governance. Our researchers are driving several of the project’s most critical pillars:

Evidence-based policy: MUERF leads the pan-European audiovisual evidence stream, designing large-scale surveys and comparative case studies to document how AI is reshaping creative labour.
The Prato Living Lab: Hosted through SensiLab, this "living lab" allows creators to work directly with AI researchers to build tools that are technically robust, affordable, and culturally sensitive.
The Competence Centre: Monash is instrumental in developing training programs and policy outputs for a new hub dedicated to responsible and inclusive AI adoption.
Advanced infrastructure: The project leverages Monash’s world-class facilities, including Wonderlab and the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance’s Digital Hub.

MUERF provides seamless connectivity across the world

Our location in Prato, Italy means that for our European partners, working with Monash through MUERF provided a seamless local gateway to:

Global connectivity: Through our international campus network, we connect European research with the Asia-Pacific, the world's fastest-growing and most consequential region.
Interdisciplinary depth: Monash delivers research and innovation excellence across ten distinct faculties, contributing broad and deep expertise to a range of global challenges.

Partner with us

Partner with Monash to build a stronger, more diverse and competitive Horizon Europe bid. Reach out to our MUERF engagement team today to start the conversation.

About CulturAI

Coordinated by the KB National Library of the Netherlands.

The project is carried out by an international consortium of universities, research institutes and cultural organizations from The Netherlands (KB National Library of the Netherlands, Delft University of Technology), Italy (Monash University European Research Foundation ETS and Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche), The United Kingdom (The University of Edinburgh), South Africa (University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg), and Luxembourg (the University of Luxembourg). Other partners include UNESCO, Europeana Foundation (The Netherlands), IDEA Consult (Belgium) and Institute for Development and International Relations (Croatia).

Funding Statement and Disclaimer: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.