Ambassador’s Voice | Jérôme Chouraqui

President of MediaClub, technology entrepreneur and doctor of computer law, Jérôme Chouraqui has been observing the transformations of the audiovisual sector for 30 years. On the occasion of the We Are Human Festival, he delivers an unsparing analysis of AI: an unprecedented revolution defined by its speed, its effects on intellectual professions, and the urgency of a broader dialogue between creators, legal experts and citizens.

«AI is moving faster than our laws»: Jérôme Chouraqui faces the artificial intelligence revolution

 

There was no hesitation in Jérôme Chouraqui's voice when asked whether AI represented just another transformation among others: "No, this is truly something else." For the co-founder of MediaClub, the comparison with the Internet does not hold. Where the web took ten to fifteen years to establish itself in everyday use, consumer AI has taken hold in barely two years. And above all, it strikes where no technology had yet dared to venture: intellectual professions. Translators, subtitlers, copywriters, entire professions are seeing their activity shrink overnight. "Google claims that 75% of its code is now written by autonomous AIs," he notes, as if to illustrate the scale of a shift that extends well beyond the media sector.

 

What concerns Chouraqui is not so much the technology itself as the speed at which it is reshuffling the cards. In the audiovisual world he navigates daily through MediaClub, a network of nearly 1,000 industry professionals, the assessment is stark: "Many still refuse to train themselves, even though it has become essential." Because AI, he stresses, does not level down: it amplifies the skills of those who master it and exposes those who do not. An experienced professional capable of formulating precise prompts will obtain results far superior to those of a novice with no background. Training has therefore become a matter of professional survival, and he addresses this through The Media Faculty, developing short modules targeted profession by profession, to integrate AI into real workflows rather than generic training courses already obsolete on the day they are released.

 

«A legal framework lagging behind»

 

On the regulatory question, Jérôme Chouraqui acknowledges the advances of the European AI Act, notably Article 53, which requires transparency on training data and opens an opt-out right for rights holders, but he is not satisfied with it. "Transparency is good. But who will monitor it? The burden falls on the creators themselves." And above all, the text remains silent on the essential point: remuneration. No rules on licensing, no value-sharing mechanism for the authors whose works have fed the models. The Seedance case, accused of having trained its AI on films without rights, illustrates for him the concrete danger: "Creators like Spielberg or Miyazaki risk being copied without compensation or consent."

 

Even more concerning in his view: the complete absence of protection for media professionals as workers. Journalists, authors, producers, the human and social dimension of this transformation is, according to him, the great omission of the European text. And while institutions deliberate, the tools themselves are evolving at a pace that no traditional legislative framework can any longer follow. Jérôme Chouraqui cites as examples AIs such as Claude or other emerging platforms whose uses change in barely a few weeks: "The skills we teach today risk being obsolete tomorrow morning."

 

«The festival as a space of resistance and dialogue»

 

It is precisely this urgency for dialogue that led Jérôme Chouraqui to commit to the We Are Human Festival. The festival-forum model seems to him today one of the rare spaces capable of bringing together artists, legal experts, technicians and citizens around the same table. "Reflection must move beyond experts. We need to reach all the stakeholders affected by this transformation." And if AI itself can be put to work in the service of debate to synthesise discussions, accelerate the drafting of legislative proposals, multiply by a hundredfold the response speed of institutions, then better to seize it than to submit to it.

 

What fundamentally drives Jérôme Chouraqui is the conviction that AI must not replace the creator but accompany them, on the condition that the human gesture, the artistic intention, remain at the centre. "The We Are Human Festival has placed the human being at the heart of art. That is what matters." Not demonising this new technology, nor idolising it. Jérôme Chouraqui embodies a clear-eyed middle path: that of a professional who has navigated every digital revolution since the Minitel, and who knows, better than anyone, that tools are never neutral and that it is always those who create who must set the rules.