From 7 to 9 July 2026, twenty-two experts from France, Germany and Poland worked together on educational policy recommendations in response to generative AI. I took part in it. Here I recount the purpose of this gathering, its working method, and the scope of what was built there.
A place founded in 1993 for dialogue between three countries
Genshagen Castle stands in Brandenburg, some twenty kilometres south of Berlin, in the middle of an English-style park. In 1993, Brigitte Sauzay, who had been the interpreter of three French presidents before becoming Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s advisor on Franco-German relations, and the historian Rudolf von Thadden founded there the Berlin-Brandenburg Institute for Franco-German Cooperation in Europe. Their intuition, four years after the fall of the wall, was to carry the Franco-German dialogue into the Länder of the former East Germany, and to involve Poland from the outset, in the spirit of the Weimar Triangle that the foreign ministers of the three countries had just created in 1991. In 2005 the institute became the Genshagen Foundation, a public-law foundation supported by the German federal government and the Land of Brandenburg. It has since worked on two fronts, artistic and cultural dialogue in Europe and European political dialogue, organising in this castle gatherings where artists, researchers, lawyers, and heads of institutions and public policy meet.
Artificial intelligence has established itself in this programme as a fully-fledged societal issue, at the precise intersection of the foundation’s two missions. In June 2025, a first forum on cultural policies brought together there twenty experts from the three countries around culture, democracy, civil rights and copyright protection in the age of AI. It resulted in the “Genshagen Proposals”, nineteen recommendations addressed to European policymakers, one of which already called for the development of AI literacy based on an understanding of the interdependence between technology and society (I attach this document to this article). The July 2026 colloquium, “Between Creation and Simulation”, is its continuation, shifting the focus to education, cultural practices and the training of young artists. The place itself, incidentally, is part of the method. You sleep there, you share meals there, you walk in the park between two sessions, and the conversations that form on the sidelines count as much as the plenary sessions.
Two scenarios for 2036 as an opening
The invitation document stated the starting point plainly: the spread of generative AI is bringing about a profound cultural transformation, comparable to the invention of the printing press, with a risk of deskilling, that is, the loss of individual skills, of elementary cultural practices and of collective knowledge, while no real societal debate exists on what school curricula and the training of young artists should become. The stated ambition was to draw up trinational educational policy guidelines, and to contribute to a European alliance for an ethical, human-centred and creative education.
Susanne Keuchel, the foundation’s director in charge of arts and cultural education, opened the gathering with a speculative fiction in two scenarios for 2036. In the first, a student learns alone at home, schools having disappeared for lack of funding, and a commercial AI steers her studies as well as her leisure. In the second, in-person learning centres rely on tools designed to European ethical standards, under educational objectives that remain public and human. Her argument was less about technology than about decision, for the first scenario demands no choice from anyone, one only has to wait, just as society waited in the face of social media before regulating once the harm was done; the second demands choices, to be made now. This asymmetry between inaction that decides and decision that costs served as the backdrop to everything that followed.
Twenty-two people who do not know the same things
The composition of the group was the first working tool. Around the table were composers, lawyers from collective rights management (ZAiKS in Poland, VG Bild-Kunst and GEMA in Germany, CEPIC for the picture agencies), a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence, a researcher from the CNRS working at IRCAM, teachers from art and design schools in Berlin, Geneva and Warsaw, a professor of translation studies, journalists and authors, a representative of the French Ministry of Education, heads of competence networks on AI in culture, and the foundation’s teams, including two interns whom we insisted should take part fully, because they had things to teach us. The full list of participants appears in the appendix to this article.
This diversity was at work at every stage. When a wording touched on copyright, the lawyers immediately spotted that a word like “transformative” has a precise meaning in intellectual property law and would be misread. When a recommendation proposed that universities develop their own models, the practitioners recalled what training a model really costs and what an art school can or cannot do, and the recommendation shifted towards what lies within its reach, experimenting with workflows using open models. When the discussion grew heated over the creativity of machines, the authors’ representatives brought back the figures on income losses, exceeding fifty percent among translators, photographers and illustrators. Each person held a piece of reality that the others could not see.
From two boards of post-its to eight workshops
The working method deserves to be told, because it embodied what the colloquium was seeking to recommend. After two framing panels, one on artistic training, the other on general education, we spent an entire morning collectively turning the harvest of discussions, noted on two large boards, into workshop topics. Eight themes emerged from it, handled in two sessions of four groups, each group made up of participants from the three countries: human relations, values, ethics and human rights; educational frameworks and rules for institutions; the human-machine relationship and AI literacy; skills, knowledge and deskilling; creative mindsets as a resource for society; sovereignty; the impact of AI on culture, society and the economy; language and narratives.
I took part in the group on human relations, values and human rights, then in the one on language and narratives. In both cases, the work was done with a marker on flipchart sheets written by several hands, and the presentation in plenary was shared among all the members of the group. None of us was working in our mother tongue, English serving as the common language, which forced each of us into a form of simplicity and gave the translators and linguists present a discreet role as arbiters of meaning.
A text negotiated sentence by sentence
The final morning, on the Thursday, was devoted to the synthesis. The drafting team handed us a first version of the future text, with a preamble stating our common positions and the skills to be cultivated, followed by a list of recommendations drawn from the eight workshops. We first physically returned to the flipchart panels, spread across the rooms of the castle, to check that nothing essential had been lost along the way, each panel being reread by at least one person who had taken part in the workshop concerned. The instruction was to concentrate our additions on concrete recommendations, for the material was abundant but many ideas remained at the stage of notes, not yet formulated in a way that a policymaker could take up. Then a tour of the room lasting nearly three hours made it possible to discuss, amend and weigh every sentence.
The discussions often bore on a single word, and each time that word carried a whole vision. We replaced “professors” with “educators” and “pupils” with “students” to cover both schools and higher education. One lawyer argued for speaking of “authors’ rights” rather than “copyright”, because copyright also protects corporations whereas authors’ rights are attached to the person and belong to human rights. When I proposed anchoring respect for human dignity “in positive law rather than in declarations of intent”, a lawyer pointed out to me that “positive law” is a technical term that would not say what I meant in English, and we wrote “in legislation”.
Some debates ran through the whole room. One participant proposed treating European independence in matters of AI as a question of sovereignty, defence and security, on the grounds that cultural influence has become a weapon in a hybrid war; others refused to let our group plead for directing more money towards defence, when what needs defending is artistic and cultural sovereignty. The wording that finally brought everyone together spoke of sovereignty in the service of cultural diversity, democratic values and security in Europe. Likewise, a proposal to create a new European research institution was set aside by those who know the European funding programmes, because such structures already exist and directing more money there would come at the expense of the arts and the humanities; the recommendation shifted towards the inclusion of art schools in European computing infrastructures, from which they are currently absent.
Other points were added as the tour of the room went on: the transparency of any use of AI in textbooks and teaching materials, along with publishers’ liability; the verification of school content by human experts; the disclosure of the funding behind seemingly independent expertise, one lawyer having recounted the real case of an expert presented in the European institutions as independent while funded by major platforms; mandatory AI literacy training for teachers, compared to a driving licence, held in tension with everyone’s right not to use these tools in their classroom, the point of balance being that training enables an informed choice without imposing use; and the idea, taken up from Axel Jean of the French Ministry of Education, that for the first time teachers and students are learning a technology at the same time, which calls for mutual learning rather than vertical transmission.
For my part, I brought three proposals for the preamble, drawn from our workshop on human rights:
- the motto “the human person is an aim, not a resource”, brought into our group by Dorota Danielewicz and whose genealogy goes back to Kant, with the requirement to anchor respect for human dignity in legislation rather than in declarations of intent;
- the idea of a chain of resistance to manipulation more robust than intellectual education alone, running from emotional awareness to self-confidence and to mental health;
- the assertion that technology is not neutral, that AI must be addressed as a socio-technical reality, and that AI literacy is grounded in the interdependence of technology and society.
And three proposals on the recommendations side:
- the pedagogy of play as a critical method;
- the systematic collection of empirical data on the actual use of AI by students and teachers, so that information about social and technical changes reaches institutions more quickly;
- support for horizontal peer learning communities of teachers and educators.
From authors’ rights to the human relationship
The detail of the recommendations belongs to the official document to come. Their scope, however, can be described. They are organised around a few broad fields which imposed themselves over the course of the workshops:
- authors’ rights, with the transparency of model training data, the right to remuneration and moral rights, treated as human rights and not as a sectoral question;
- the European sovereignty of tools and infrastructures, from the software used in schools to institutions’ access to computing resources;
- the governance of the education sector, with standards, advisory boards connecting schools to a changing world, and the transparency of public-private partnerships;
- teacher training;
- a critical AI literacy throughout the educational pathway, including the real harms of these systems and awareness of authors’ rights;
- pedagogy and assessment, with the primacy of process over product, the final human decision in grading, AI-free spaces and experimentation labs;
- and, running through all the rest, the human relationship and trust, since education happens first between human beings, in institutions that must remain environments of social and democratic learning.
I find in this architecture, almost term for term, the fields I have seen taking shape over the past three years in my own work supporting cultural policies in the face of AI. This convergence, which each of us reached by our own paths, seems to me a serious indication that these fields are the right ones.
A way of producing public policy
What I bring back from Genshagen goes beyond the content of the recommendations. The colloquium maintained real disagreements to the very end, between a computer science professor who defines herself as an AI dissident and practitioners who experiment with it every day, and it nevertheless produced a common text, not through soft consensus but through a labour of precision, each side accepting that its position be formulated in terms the other could sign. The method itself, trinational, horizontal, negotiated sentence by sentence, with interns taking part on the same footing as the heads of institutions, puts into practice what the text recommends for education. The results will now be consolidated by the drafting team, sent to the participants, then presented and discussed publicly, in Berlin and elsewhere. For my part, I will continue to carry this work into the French contexts where I am active, for recommendations only exist if people circulate them, translate them and defend them, each from their own place.
