From 7 to 9 July 2026, twenty-two experts from France, Germany and Poland drafted together a set of educational policy recommendations in response to generative AI. I took part. Here I explain why this meeting took place, how we worked and what the recommendations cover.
At Genshagen, an institute founded in 1993 to bring three countries into dialogue
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 adviser on Franco-German relations, and the historian Rudolf von Thadden founded there the Berlin-Brandenburg Institute for Franco-German Cooperation in Europe. Four years after the fall of the Wall, they sensed that the Franco-German dialogue had to be carried into the Länder of the former East Germany, with Poland involved 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 funded by the German federal government and the Land of Brandenburg. It has since had two missions, artistic and cultural dialogue in Europe and European political dialogue, and organises in this castle meetings where artists, researchers, lawyers, heads of institutions and policymakers cross paths.
Artificial intelligence has become a social issue in its own right within this programme, one that falls under both of the foundation’s missions at once. In June 2025, the foundation gathered there twenty experts from the three countries for a first forum on cultural policy, on culture, democracy, civil rights and the protection of authors’ rights in the age of AI. This forum led to the “Genshagen Proposals”, nineteen recommendations addressed to European policymakers, which already included a call to develop an AI literacy founded 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”, follows on from that forum, this time on education, cultural practices and the training of young artists. The place, incidentally, is part of the method. You sleep there, eat together, walk in the park between sessions, and the conversations that start up on the sidelines count as much as the plenary sessions.
Two scenarios for 2036 by way of opening
In the invitation, the organisers stated the problem plainly: the spread of generative AI is bringing about a deep cultural transformation, comparable to the invention of printing, with a risk of deskilling, that is, a loss of individual skills, of basic cultural practices and of collective knowledge, while there is no real public debate about what school curricula and the training of young artists should become. They set out their ambition to draw up trinational educational policy guidelines and to contribute to a European alliance for an ethical, creative and human-centred education.
Susanne Keuchel, the foundation’s director responsible for arts and cultural education, opened the meeting with a piece of speculative fiction in two scenarios for 2036. In the first, a student learns alone at home, the schools having closed for lack of funding, and a commercial AI steers her studies as well as her leisure. In the second, people learn in person, in centres equipped with tools designed to European ethical standards, in the service of educational goals that human beings and public institutions continue to set. Her argument was less about technology than about decision: in the first scenario nobody has anything to decide, it is enough to wait, as we did with social networks, legislating only once the damage was done; in the second there are choices to be made, and to be made now. This asymmetry, between inaction, which lets others decide in our place, and choices that come at a price, was the backdrop to everything that followed.
Twenty-two people who do not know the same things
The make-up of the group was the first working tool. Around the table were composers, lawyers from collective rights management organisations (ZAiKS in Poland, VG Bild-Kunst and GEMA in Germany, CEPIC for photo agencies), a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence, a CNRS researcher 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 National Education, heads of networks of expertise on AI in culture, and the foundation’s staff, including two interns whom we insisted should take part fully, because they had things to teach us. The full list of participants is given in the annexe to this article.
When a wording touched on authors’ rights, the lawyers immediately spotted that a word like “transformative” has a precise meaning in intellectual property law and would be misread. When the draft recommendations included the idea that universities should develop their own models, the practitioners reminded us what training a model really costs and what an art school can and cannot do, and we brought the recommendation back to what is achievable, trying out ways of working with open models. When some people got carried away by the creativity of machines, the authors’ representatives brought the discussion back to the fall in income, of more than fifty per cent among translators, photographers and illustrators. Each of us knew a part of reality that the others could not see.
From two boards of post-its to eight workshops
After two framing panels, one on artistic training, the other on general education, we spent a whole morning sorting together everything the discussions had produced, written on post-its on two large boards, to turn it into workshop topics. Eight themes came out of it, which we dealt with in two rounds of four workshops, each workshop bringing together 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 unlearning; the creative mind as a resource for society; sovereignty; the effects 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 markers on flip-chart sheets written by several hands, and all the members of the group shared the report back to the plenary. None of us was working in our mother tongue, English being the common language, which forced each of us to speak simply and gave the translators and linguists present a discreet role as arbiters of meaning.
A text negotiated sentence by sentence
We devoted the last morning, the Thursday, to the synthesis. The drafting team handed us a first version of the future text, with a preamble containing our shared positions and the skills to be cultivated, then a list of recommendations drawn from the eight workshops, and asked us to concentrate on concrete recommendations, since there was no shortage of material but many ideas were still at the stage of notes, not yet worded in a way a policymaker could take up. We first went back to the flip-chart sheets, spread through the rooms of the castle, to check that nothing essential had been lost along the way, each sheet being reread by at least one person who had taken part in the workshop concerned. Then, in a round-table discussion of nearly three hours, we discussed, amended and weighed every sentence.
The discussions often turned on a single word, and behind each word there was a way of seeing things. We replaced “teachers” with “educators” and “pupils” with “students” so as to cover both school and higher education. A lawyer argued for “authors’ rights” rather than “copyright”, because copyright also protects companies, 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 which, in English, would not say what I meant, and we wrote “in legislation”.
On some points we were divided. One participant proposed treating European independence in AI as a matter of sovereignty, defence and security, on the grounds that cultural influence has become a weapon in a hybrid war; others refused to have our group argue for more money to go to defence, when it is artistic and cultural sovereignty that needs defending. We finally all agreed on one wording, sovereignty in the service of cultural diversity, democratic values and security in Europe. Likewise, those who know the European funding programmes set aside a proposal to create a new European research institution, because such structures already exist and giving them more money would come at the expense of the arts and humanities; we therefore reworded the recommendation, to ask that art schools, currently absent from European computing infrastructures, be given access to them and be involved in their development.
We added other points as the discussion went round: transparency about any use of AI in textbooks and teaching materials, with publishers held responsible; verification of school content by human experts; an obligation to disclose who funds apparently independent expert opinions, a lawyer having told us of an expert presented in the European institutions as independent and funded by large platforms; compulsory AI literacy training for teachers, which people compared to a driving licence and which we weighed against each person’s right not to use these tools in their classroom, the agreement being this: training makes an informed choice possible without imposing use; and the idea, taken up from Axel Jean of the French Ministry of National Education, that for the first time teachers and students are learning a technology at the same time, which calls for mutual learning rather than top-down transmission.
For my part I put forward three proposals for the preamble, from our workshop on human rights:
- the formula “the human person is an end, not a resource”, proposed in our group by Dorota Danielewicz and going back to Kant, with the requirement that respect for human dignity be anchored in legislation rather than in declarations of intent;
- the idea that, to resist manipulation, intellectual education is not enough, and that it also takes knowing one’s own emotions, self-confidence and mental health;
- the statement that technology is not neutral, that AI is both a technology and a social fact, and that one cannot learn it without learning at the same time what it does to society.
And three proposals on the side of the recommendations:
- the pedagogy of play as a critical method;
- regular surveys of what students and teachers actually do with AI, so that institutions find out sooner what is changing;
- support for groups in which teachers and educators learn from one another.
The seven grounds the recommendations cover
The detail of the recommendations will be in the official document, still to be published. What I can say is what they cover. They fall into seven grounds, which emerged of their own accord over the course of the workshops:
- authors’ rights, with transparency about models’ training data, the right to remuneration and moral rights, treated as human rights and not as a sectoral question;
- European sovereignty over 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 linking schools to what is changing around them, and transparency about public-private partnerships;
- teacher training;
- a critical AI literacy throughout schooling and studies, which also teaches the real harms of these systems and authors’ rights;
- pedagogy and assessment, with attention paid to the process rather than the product, grades always decided by a human being, AI-free spaces and laboratories for experimentation;
- and, present in all the others, the human relationship and trust, because education happens first of all between human beings, in institutions that must remain places where people learn together, and learn democracy.
I find in this list, almost point for point, the subjects that have kept coming up over the past three years in my own work supporting cultural policies in the face of AI. That we arrived at the same subjects, each by our own path, seems to me a serious sign that they are the right ones.
A common text, without a soft consensus
I bring back from Genshagen more than the content of the recommendations. Real disagreements remained to the very end, between a computer science professor who calls herself an AI dissident and practitioners who use it every day, and yet we produced a common text, without any soft consensus, through work on precision, each of us accepting that our position be written in terms the others could sign. The method itself, trinational, horizontal, negotiated sentence by sentence, with interns taking part on the same footing as directors of institutions, was already a way of applying our own recommendations on education. The drafting team will now consolidate the results, send them to the participants, then present them and open them to public debate, in Berlin and elsewhere. For my part I will continue to make this work known in the places where I intervene in France, because recommendations only exist if people circulate them, translate them and defend them, each from their own position.
