A Belgrade-based initiative is building a digital shield for the independent creative community
Community mapping sheds light on infrastructure blind spots
Imagine spending months composing a piece of music, painting a canvas, or writing a novel, only to discover that an artificial intelligence (AI) system was trained on your work without your knowledge, your consent, or a single cent of compensation. But you do not know if you have any rights, who to ask, or how to protect your work. For thousands of independent artists across Serbia and the wider region, this is not a hypothetical scenario. It is an everyday reality. And for most of them, there has been nowhere to turn.
That is precisely the problem that AIRS, the AI Rights Shield for Independent Artists and Cultural Scene project, was created to address.
A scene under siege
Serbia’s independent cultural scene is vibrant and fiercely creative. Musicians, visual artists, writers, illustrators, and designers produce work that shapes how communities express themselves, how identities are formed, and how memory is kept alive. But the majority of these creators operate outside institutional safety nets. They are freelancers, one-person studios, or collectives running on passion and precarious income.
When generative AI arrived at scale, it brought with it a wave of exploitation that these artists were structurally unprepared to confront. AI companies harvest creative works from the internet to train their systems, often without attribution, licensing, or compensation. National copyright laws, written for a pre-AI world, offer little clarity or protection. And most artists simply do not know what rights they have, or what they could do when those rights are violated.
The gap was not just technical. It was a gap in knowledge, in tools, and in power.
Building the shield
KreativaLab, a civil society organization from Belgrade dedicated to innovation at the intersection of digital technologies, culture, and creative industries, decided to do something about it. In 2026, they launched AIRS as a structured, participatory response to the crisis. The response isn’t a complaint, but a toolkit to empower the independent cultural scene.
The project rests on three interconnected pillars.
The first is literacy. Before artists can defend their rights, they need to understand what those rights are and where the threats come from. AIRS launched an open risk assessment survey targeting Serbia’s independent cultural scene, mapping how creators experience AI-driven threats, what they know about their legal options, and where the gaps in awareness are deepest. A hands-on workshop-type event in Belgrade followed, designed not as a lecture but as a space for collective capacity-building, where artists learned from each other as much as from facilitators.
The second pillar is the AIRS web application itself: a free, bilingual (Serbian and English) digital tool that combines an AI legal guide, a self-assessment toolkit with real-world risk scenarios, and a policy brief template that individuals and civil society organizations can adapt and use. The app will be built to be accessible to someone with no legal background: a visual artist who wants to know if their portfolio is at risk; a musician trying to understand what “fair use” means in the age of AI. It will be practical, jargon-free, and freely available.
The third pillar is advocacy. The @AI-RS campaign running under the slogan “Your work, your right!” targets not only artists but policymakers, cultural institutions, and media. Its purpose is to make AI copyright misconduct visible and personally relevant: to turn an abstract policy debate into something that feels urgent and human. The campaign is designed to reach more than 15,000 people digitally, injecting the voices of Serbia’s independent creators into national and regional conversations about AI governance.
Looking forward
The outcomes AIRS is working toward are both immediate and long-term. When KreativaLab opened the survey in May 2026, the response made one thing clear: artists wanted to talk about this. They had been carrying the anxiety of AI exploitation largely in silence, without vocabulary for it, without a forum, and without a sense that anyone was listening. The survey gave AIRS real data, rooted in lived experience, that could speak directly to policymakers in a language they understand.
In the near term, the web application will be live and freely accessible, a cohort of artists will be equipped with practical advocacy skills, and the @AI-RS campaign will bring the issue into public discourse.
But ambition runs deeper. KreativaLab is building AIRS as a replicable model, designed to be adopted by other organizations across the Western Balkans and beyond. The codebase will be open-sourced on GitHub. The goal is not to solve the problem in Serbia alone, but to demonstrate that a small, resource-constrained civil society organization can build something that travels.
What this taught us
Working on AIRS has been a reminder that digital rights are not a niche concern. They are a cultural question, a labor question, and ultimately a question about who gets to benefit from creativity: the people who create, or the systems that consume? What Serbia’s independent artists face, artists everywhere face. The legal frameworks are different; the exploitation is the same.
For too long, the conversation about AI governance has happened without the people most affected by it. Policymakers negotiate, technology companies lobby, academics theorize, while the musician who spent a decade building a catalog watches it disappear into a training dataset.
AIRS is an attempt to change that. To put tools in the hands of the people who need them. To make the invisible visible. To remind the world and artists themselves that their work has value, their rights are real, and their voices belong in this conversation.
