Milan's Creatives Speak Out: How Duplicate Image Replacement Is Reshaping the City's Visual Economy

A growing number of Milan's independent photographers and graphic designers say they have lost contracts, seen their work duplicated without consent, and watched fees collapse — all traced to the rapid spread of AI-driven duplicate image replacement tools that platforms and publishers are now deploying at scale. The complaints are concentrated in the city's creative districts, where the fashion and design economy supports tens of thousands of freelance workers.

The issue has sharpened in 2026 because Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics coverage, scheduled to begin in earnest this autumn, is pushing media organisations and sponsors to build enormous digital asset libraries fast and cheaply. Several production companies near Porta Nuova have told colleagues they are using automated replacement pipelines to swap out licensed images with AI-generated alternatives the moment a licensing fee threshold is crossed. Photographers say that threshold is often as low as €150 per image — a rate that was already considered below market three years ago.

Voices from the Navigli and Brera

At a co-working space on Via Tortona, which anchors Milan's Zona Tortona design cluster, a dozen freelancers gathered informally last month to compare notes. The session, organised by the independent association Fotografi Milanesi, drew photographers who had shot for fashion houses along Via della Spiga and editorial clients based in the Isola neighbourhood. Their accounts converged on one problem: jobs that existed in January 2025 no longer exist today, replaced by automated systems that pull stock imagery, run it through a deduplication algorithm, and substitute any flagged duplicate with a generated alternative before a human editor ever sees it.

One studio owner who operates out of a space near Corso Como described receiving a rejection notice from a major fashion client stating that her submitted portfolio images had been identified as duplicates of existing assets in the client's library — images she had shot herself and licensed previously to that same client. The rejection was automatic. No human reviewed it. She declined to be named pending a potential legal dispute, but her experience was echoed by several others at the Fotografi Milanesi session.

The Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, which trains hundreds of visual arts graduates each year, has begun incorporating discussions of AI image tools into its curriculum. Faculty there have noted publicly, in materials posted to the institution's website, that the question of image ownership in an era of automated replacement is unresolved under current Italian copyright law.

What the Numbers Show

Italy's national association for professional photographers, Associazione Fotografi Professionisti, published a sector survey in March 2026 showing that average day rates for commercial photography in Lombardy had dropped by roughly 18 percent between 2023 and 2025. The survey, available on the association's website, attributed a significant portion of that decline to clients substituting licensed images with AI-generated alternatives. Milan accounts for the largest share of the Italian commercial photography market.

Licensing platform Getty Images revised its Italy pricing tiers in February 2026, a move that several Milan-based agents said had the practical effect of pushing mid-range buyers toward cheaper AI-generation options rather than renewing standard subscriptions. No official statement from Getty Images specifying the reasons for the Italian revision has been published at the time of writing.

The European Union's AI Act, which began phased enforcement in August 2024, includes provisions on synthetic media but does not yet contain explicit protections governing the automated replacement of human-made images in commercial workflows. A dedicated working group under the European Commission's Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology is due to report by the end of 2026.

For Milan's freelancers, the practical advice circulating in communities like the Fotografi Milanesi network is blunt: register every image with a timestamped metadata record, include explicit contractual clauses prohibiting automated substitution, and pursue clients through the Tribunale di Milano's intellectual property division if violations occur. It is slow, expensive, and uncertain — but right now it is the only formal route available. The Olimpiadi Milano Cortina 2026 organising committee has not published procurement guidelines addressing AI image replacement as of this week.