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The Legal Aesthetics of Copyright, How AI Unmakes Images
Séverine Dusollier and Nicolas Malevé
Date: Monday 18 May 2026
Time: 4.00pm (Paris – CEST) / Time in your location
Venue: Zoom
In the long history of a repetitive crisis caused by the introduction of technologies in cultural production, Generative AI disturbs the notion of authorship that the law deploys to grant its protection to artistic works.
This talk is a dialogue between two strands of thinking, photography and legal theory, to try and make sense of the current configuration of technology, law and aesthetics that sustain and contest AI image generation. Building on recent photo theory, it traces an evolution of the digital image starting from the networked image, through a logic of accelerated circulation and ubiquity. And it analyses its transformation into a modality of platform-seeing where platforms capabilities depend on image aggregates such as datasets and models. Generative AI performs a series of cuts, or dissociations on images that affect what an image is and the agents involved in its production. In parallel, the law creates its own cuts and dissociations between machine and technique, expression and content. Taking the current controversies opposing right holders (ie artists) and genAI companies as a point of departure, our proposal is that the objects produced by these cuts do not correspond and this profound difference results in a dramatic crisis that can hardly be resolved in the current legal framework.
The only way out probably is to ask again the question raised by Suchman in Human-Machine Reconfigurations, about the possibilities to reconceptualize human agency without essentializing it and separating it from the sociomaterial networks in which creative practices take place.Séverine Dusollier is Professor of Intellectual Property at Sciences Po Paris and holds a Senior Chair at the Institut Universitaire de France. Her current research deals with the concept of authorship, contractual protection and remuneration of authors and performers, artificial intelligence and the meaning of images, exceptions and limitations, commons and property, public domain.
Séverine Dusollier is Professor of Intellectual Property at Sciences Po Paris and holds a Senior Chair at the Institut Universitaire de France. Her current research deals with the concept of authorship, contractual protection and remuneration of authors and performers, artificial intelligence and the meaning of images, exceptions and limitations, commons and property, public domain.
Nicolas Malevé is a visual artist and computer programmer and a post-doctoral researcher at Sciences Po, Media Lab. From 2022 to 2025 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. After a PhD on Algorithms of vision, he investigates the socio-technical networks of machine learning and their artistic and epistemic implications. He is affiliated to the Computational Culture Lab, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.