Milan's Design World Reckons With the AI Image Theft Crisis: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

Milan's fashion and design economy, worth an estimated €7.2 billion annually to the Lombardy region, is facing a structural threat that executives and cultural officials have spent much of 2026 scrambling to address: the mass proliferation of AI-generated duplicate images that replicate, redistribute and effectively plagiarise original visual work produced by the city's designers, photographers and luxury houses.

The issue has reached a tipping point this spring, accelerating conversations across Via Tortona's creative studios, the Politecnico di Milano's design faculty, and the corridors of the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana. What once seemed a distant digital-rights abstraction is now landing in the IP departments of real companies with real financial consequences.

What the Experts Are Saying

Academics at the Politecnico di Milano — the institution that trains a significant share of Italy's working product and visual designers — have been among the clearest voices on the structural inadequacy of existing EU law. Researchers at the university's Design Department argue that the EU AI Act, which came into full force in August 2025, does not sufficiently address the specific problem of image duplication at scale by generative models trained on copyrighted visual datasets. The Act's provisions on transparency and high-risk classification were written primarily with biometric and decision-making systems in mind, leaving a gap that the fashion photography sector in particular has been quick to identify.

Professionals affiliated with the Associazione Fotografi Professionisti — AFP, which maintains a significant membership base in Milan's Zona Tortona and Isola neighbourhoods — have described the situation in stark terms at recent industry roundtables. Their core concern is not theoretical: licensing revenues for original commercial photography have declined measurably as brands and agencies substitute AI-generated stand-ins for catalogue and editorial work that would previously have required a paid shoot. No authoritative industry-wide revenue figure has been independently published for the Italian market, but AFP members have circulated internal survey data suggesting double-digit percentage drops in certain commercial categories since late 2024.

At La Triennale di Milano, the institution's curatorial team has begun requiring digital provenance documentation — essentially a creation certificate — for all image submissions to its annual design exhibitions, a policy introduced formally in March 2026. The move is widely cited in design circles as one of the first concrete institutional responses in the city to the duplicate image problem, even if its scope is limited to the exhibition context.

What City Hall and Industry Bodies Are Doing

The Comune di Milano has not yet published a dedicated policy on AI image duplication, though the city's Assessorato alla Cultura has confirmed it is engaged with the broader EU AI Act implementation timeline. The tension between the centre-left administration of Mayor Beppe Sala and the centre-right Regione Lombardia has, according to industry observers, slowed coordinated regional action — both governments have signalled interest but produced little joint output.

The Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, headquartered in Via Gerolamo Morone in the city centre, has been more vocal. In a position paper circulated to member houses in April 2026, the body called on the European Commission to introduce mandatory watermarking and metadata retention rules for all AI-generated visual content used in commercial contexts by January 2027. The paper stopped short of demanding a moratorium on generative tools but explicitly named the duplication of runway and lookbook imagery as a primary commercial harm.

For individual creatives operating out of Milan's smaller studios — particularly those clustered around the Navigli canal district and the Bovisa creative hub — the practical advice emerging from IP lawyers and industry bodies is consistent: register original works with the Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori before publication, document creation metadata rigorously, and avoid uploading high-resolution originals to platforms whose terms of service permit use of content for model training.

The European Commission is expected to publish implementation guidance on the AI Act's transparency provisions by September 2026. Milan's design and fashion industries will be watching that document closely — it may determine whether the city's creative economy gets meaningful protection, or is left to negotiate the problem studio by studio.