Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 27th, 2025

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

I'm calling the meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number nine of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

Before we start, I can confirm that all witnesses online have completed the required connection tests in advance of this meeting.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before you speak. All comments should be addressed through the chair.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Monday, September 22, 2025, the committee is meeting to study the effects of technological advances in AI on the creative industries.

I want to thank all of our witnesses who are with us today here in the room and joining us online.

We have, as an individual, Alexandra Kearney, co-founder, Artificial Agency. We have Wyatt Tessari L'Allié, founder and executive director, AI Governance and Safety Canada. We have Adrian Capobianco, CEO at BILI Social. We have Alain Strati and Lisa Broadfoot from the Canadian Media Producers Association. We have Jonathan Roberge and Etienne Grenier from Chaire de recherche du Québec sur l'intelligence artificielle et le numérique francophones, and Laurent Dubois and Véronyque Roy, from the Société des auteurs et autrices de radio, télévision et cinéma.

Each organization will have five minutes to present us with opening statements and then we'll go into questions from our committee members.

We'll start with Ms. Alexandra Kearney.

[Alexandra Kearney, Co-Founder, Artificial Agency, As an Individual]

Thank you, Madam Chair. I am grateful for the invitation to share with the committee today.

I'm Dr. Alex Kearney, co-founder and head of agents at Artificial Agency, where we build interactive AI systems that are used by game developers and designers to power the next generation of interactive entertainment. Artificial Agency is a Canadian-based company, with over 90% of our team based here in Canada, and the overwhelming majority of those folks being in person in our Edmonton office.

I want to start today not by discussing our research or our product; rather, I want to acknowledge Artificial Agency's deep Canadian roots. My co-founder Brian and I are both proud Canadians. Our careers were made possible by the world-class AI community here in Alberta. We both chose to move here, of all of the places in the world, because of Alberta's world-class research. Without the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute and the dedicated work of our local AI community over the past half century, I would not be speaking to you here today.

The three Canadian AI research centres, Vector, Mila and AMii, are, without a doubt, national treasures. If there is one thing that we can do to succeed as a country in this century, both technically and culturally, it is to protect and nurture these research institutes, along with their output.

Brian and I feel that, for many reasons, Canada is the right place to build Artificial Agency, including a strong desire to contribute back to this community that we call home. We believe that all Canadians, especially Canadian creatives, deserve to benefit from the fruits of AI's success economically. This is why we didn't choose to build Artificial Agency in New York or San Francisco, where capital is close and accessible. We chose Canada, and we chose Edmonton. We want Canadian creatives to have the tools to define global entertainment in this century.

At Artificial Agency, we are unified by a singular vision: to make tools that enable game designers and programmers to put run-time intelligence into any aspects of their game, unlocking new experiences and genres of entertainment that could be made no other way. We are seeking to enable the next generation of digital storytellers.

Our behaviour engine is an AI system that interprets player input and game state to adapt the content of a game in real time. It is a form of agentic intelligence. It powers a system that is able to take actions to influence the environment, the narrative and the characters of a game. These agents operate within game worlds authored by studios. Agents can be characters that are able to improvise within the bounds set by game designers, or they can be game directors, silently adapting the game based on how players engage with the world.

One of our earliest advocates was a narrative designer. With our tools, he bypassed weeks of hand-off between writing and scripting. He could author character behaviour directly, see it immediately and tune it live. It made authorship for this writer interactive. That's the kind of feedback loop that AI should empower. Traditionally, this designer would write, and then it would take weeks for that work to be interpreted by programmers and technical designers. With our behaviour engine, he was able to immediately see the impact of his writing—how characters behave differently and express themselves—and to feel how the game felt. Our behaviour engine is, for these people, a new creative interface, one that expands what designers can do, not a threat to their authorship.

Our behaviour engine enables game designers to act as directors instructing actors in a performance. Through agentic intelligence, characters are transformed from flat, programmatic bots, into rich, dynamic improvisors with backstories, inner lives and goals. We're not just changing how games are made; we're redefining what games are. We're expanding the artistic medium.

Blanket restrictions on AI in creative domains risk ossifying the very things that we should be expanding. If policy-makers treat all generative systems as a monolith, we will constrain interactive mediums before they're able to reach their maturity.

In partnership with studios, we opt to use open-source models such as Llama or Qwen, but we don't use them to imitate. We use them to reason, adapt and react within the authored boundaries of a game. What matters here isn't the origin of the model. Rather, it's the intent and containment of its application. No content generated by our agents is meant to resemble, mimic or reproduce external works.

The creative risk here isn't from bad actors; it's from narrowing the definition of authorship to exclude the computational. If we lock down generative methods pre-emptively, we do not protect Canadian culture. Instead, we prevent it from evolving and impacting the world through new formats.

Thank you very much for your time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Thank you.

Next we go to Wyatt Tessari L'Allié from AI Governance and Safety Canada. You have five minutes.

[Wyatt Tessari L'Allié, Founder and Executive Director, AI Governance and Safety Canada]

Madam Chair and committee members, thank you for the honour of inviting me here.

AI Governance and Safety Canada is a non‑partisan not‑for‑profit organization and a community of people across the country working to ensure that advanced artificial intelligence is safe and beneficial for all. Since 2022, we've been giving the federal government forward‑looking public policy recommendations in the public interest. This includes submissions to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada and Treasury Board, and testimony before the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology during its study of Bill C‑27.

We have broad expertise in artificial intelligence. Today, I hope to give the committee an overview of how artificial intelligence is affecting the creative industries against the backdrop of the broader challenges posed by artificial intelligence.

Last Tuesday, as part of our formal submission to the Minister of AI's consultations on Canada's national strategy, we unveiled our new white paper, titled “Preparing for the AI Crisis: A Plan for Canada”.

The basic situation we face is this: With human intelligence staying the same and AI getting better by the day, we are heading into a world in which AI vastly surpasses us in all domains. This includes ones like running companies, caring for people and creating high-quality original content—areas where we currently still hold an advantage. Building this level of AI is the explicit goal of frontier labs like OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta.

Smarter-than-human AI will have significantly greater impacts on society than the generative AI models we've seen so far. In the case of the creative industries, some likely implications include the following.

First, smarter-than-human AI won't need to train on copyrighted human content. The models we see today that need to scrape millions of books and songs in order to produce anything intelligible are a passing phase. Much like the human brain, smarter-than-human AI will be able to learn from relatively little data—such as public domain data—and go on to create authentic and engaging works of art.

Second, the quality of AI content will improve far beyond human levels. Right now, we look at most AI content and we rightfully identify it as slop or low-grade. This is a passing phase. Within a few short years, the situation could be reversed, with the human-created content looking comparatively quaint and simplistic.

Third, we're already seeing platforms like Spotify and Amazon get flooded by AI content. This is just the beginning. Within a few years, when we will likely have high-quality customized AI content available on demand at very low cost, we could easily be in a situation where over 90% of what Canadians see on their platforms is AI-generated.

These are just some of the impacts on one sector. Every aspect of society will be affected. Think of your own roles as MPs. What will you, as politicians, be doing when every bill you write, every speech you give or every political strategy you develop will be better done by AI, and when your voters will know that, for every decision you make throughout your day, your best bet will be to ask the AI what to do? Also, to turn the tables again, what will we as a not-for-profit be doing when AI will be able to better monitor developments and advocate for better policies than us?

We don't know, but that's the level of AI that frontier labs think they can build in as little as one to three years, and a number of trends suggest they may be right. We hope there will be more time than that, but a responsible government needs to launch preparations immediately.

This brings me to our recommendations for the Canadian government.

First, pivot to meet the AI crisis. This 2025 study on the impacts of AI on the creative industries is like a December 2019 study on that first coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. You've stumbled across an early warning sign of an industry that has happened to be hit hard by an early wave of AI. The big story is what's coming next, and the biggest impacts will be elsewhere—namely, national security, public safety, geopolitics and economic and fiscal shocks. This is not a crisis you will be able to fit into an existing agenda or delegate to a ministry. For Canada's response to be adequate, this will require a whole-of-government effort.

Second, spearhead the global response. AI is a global challenge requiring global solutions. Canada is in a good position to host and lead global talks, and doing so will put us in a better position when we negotiate with multinational firms.

Third, build Canada's resilience. Turn the fact that the creative industries are getting impacted first into an opportunity to pilot the support measures that other sectors could soon need as well. Pass measures that are beneficial to all Canadians and are robust to future AI, such as labelling content and protecting against deepfakes.

Fourth, launch a national conversation on AI. Canadians deserve to be informed and consulted on a technology that will fundamentally reshape their lives. Minister Guilbeault and Minister Solomon are well placed to lead nationwide public hearings that could educate and consult Canadians on core decisions pertaining to our collective AI future.

In these brief remarks, I hope to have conveyed to you the momentousness of what is about to unfold in AI. To quote Prime Minister Carney, “We will have to do things that we haven't imagined before, at speeds we didn't think possible.” The clock is ticking. Let’s get to work.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Thank you.

Next, we have Adrian Capobianco, from BILI Social.

You have five minutes, sir.

[Adrian Capobianco, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, BILI Social]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, honourable members of the committee, for the opportunity to participate and present today.

To provide a brief introduction, my career background was serving as an executive and CEO at various regional and global advertising agencies, working with many of the best-known Canadian and global brands, and overseeing hundreds of millions in advertising spend annually.

A few years ago we launched BILI Social. Our mission at BILI is simply to help connect brands with social media influencers. I've seen more disruption and opportunity in the last few years than in the last few decades. This is only being accelerated by the impact of AI.

For a bit of context, we're a company founded in Canada that operates across North America. I'm proud to say we fight and win above our weight class. We're modest in size, yet manage to compete against very well-established peers and international conglomerates, in part by leveraging AI in our business.

In the context of this committee's study, our involvement with creativity relates to advertising, digital media and social media content. Our creative community is social media influencers, many of whom are small businesses themselves that are earning livelihoods through digital platforms.

While we are mindful that the world of social media is far from perfect and that AI poses risk, our approach to AI is that we believe it is not only preferable, but also it is a requirement to test, learn and leverage AI tools to help us build and scale our business. We work with many athletes, as an example, so I'll offer a sports analogy: We use AI for the assist, not the goal. We don't fully lean on AI to create artificial influencers, as an example, but we leverage AI in many ways in our business. We believe that leveraging AI is important not only for our business but for many Canadian businesses like ours.

For additional context for the committee, I'll share a bit of information on how we operate. In doing so, I'll explain five ways in which we leverage AI and how it impacts our business.

First, the first time we used AI was almost three years ago when ChatGPT first launched. We knew we could use AI to create text content more quickly, but we weren't sure if we could do it better, so we tested it. We used AI to help refine social media text posts and we tested it versus human-written posts. What we found in our research was that the AI-enhanced post generated 28% more engagement. That's 28% more likes, shares, comments and views, which for our clients, ourselves and our creator partners is important. All that was available to us for free.

Second, we provide social content services. We call this BILI Boost. This is the creation of influencer social media posts to help promote products and services for our clients. For context, in North America there are approximately 10 million creators and we have data on all of them. To be efficient, we use AI to find, audit and filter these creators to help narrow down to the 100, 10 or one that is relevant for our client partners. This would be impossible manually.

Third, we provide commerce services. We call this BILI Base, which is directly selling products via online referrals. We use AI to match our creators with products and content that are relevant to them, so that they can deliver more relevant and interesting content to their audiences.

Fourth, we're looking to identify quickly changing trends and insights to keep our clients informed. For this project, our existing staff didn't have the time to support the initiative, so I started working with a group of business school students. Interestingly, their first instinct was to use AI to search, source and package up these trends. This is a service we'll now be able to offer our clients, which previously would not have been feasible. It allows us to compete with larger international competitors and vastly larger teams.

Fifth and finally, for a peek at where this is going, as I mentioned, we work with a number of athlete creators. For example, we're the exclusive social commerce partner of the CFL union and the NHL alumni. We want to use AI to help open new markets to these athlete creators. For example, using our video AI tools, an English-speaking creator can now deliver content in French and Spanish, which opens them up to a North American market, or in Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese, which opens those creators, and the Canadian brands they promote, to Asian markets.

In conclusion, our philosophy at BILI Social is that we have very little ability to impact what the world will do with AI and it's very clear the world is progressing at full steam with its adoption. Our decision, pragmatically, is what we choose to do with this. Going back to the sports analogy, we believe Canada can either participate as players and owners in the AI game or sit on the sidelines and pay to watch others win.

Our decision at BILI is clear. We play in the game and compete to win. To fuel this approach, it would be great if we had the support, funding and encouragement of our government to help accelerate the adoption of AI for thousands of businesses just like ours, so they can continue to fight above their weight class.

Thank you for the invitation to participate today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Thank you.

Next we'll turn to the Canadian Media Producers Association and Alain Strati and Lisa Broadfoot.

You collectively have five minutes.

[Alain Strati, Senior Vice-President, Industry and Policy, Canadian Media Producers Association]

Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the Standing Committee.

Thank you for inviting us to appear before you today.

The Canadian Media Producers Association, CMPA, represents more than 600 independent production companies working in film, television and digital media. Our members employ Canadian talent and bring Canada’s stories to audiences here at home and around the world.

Producers are storytellers and entrepreneurs. They bring to life the cultural expression that unites Canadians while driving investment, jobs and innovation in every region of our country.

The work of producing is fundamentally human. Producers take ideas and bring them to our screen by raising financing, managing budgets, hiring crews and assuming the financial and legal risks that make production possible. They collaborate with writers, directors, performers and skilled trades whose creativity and experience bring Canadian stories to life.

While AI can assist human creation, it cannot and should not replace it. Our comments today may at times sound familiar, since they centre around the three pillars of authorization, remuneration and transparency. These are common-sense principles grounded in established law that should anchor Canada’s approach to generative AI. Simply put, works should not be used without consent, creators must be paid when their works are used and the process must be transparent so that creators know when and how their works are being used.

Consistent with these principles, there is no need for a new text and data mining exception in the Copyright Act. The act is technologically neutral and has proven capable of adapting to new tools and workflows over decades of innovation. New exceptions would simply authorize what is now unlawful, the mass ingestion of copyrighted material without consent, credit or compensation. Canada’s copyright system already accommodates innovation while crucially ensuring that creators are paid for the use of their work. Undermining that balance would weaken both our creative economy and the public trust that underpins it.

[Lisa Broadfoot, Vice-President, Industry and Business Affairs, Canadian Media Producers Association]

The CMPA supports the development of a vibrant licensing market where producers and other rights holders can freely negotiate for the use of their intellectual property for AI training and other uses. Producers negotiate complex licensing and distribution agreements across multiple territories. They are highly skilled in the creative licensing marketplace and can translate this expertise to negotiating with AI platforms. We acknowledge that this is an emerging marketplace; however, its growth and legitimacy depends on clear rules of engagement and transparency.

We know that these platforms have trained on copyrighted works, but rights holders have no way of knowing if their works have been used. Transparency keeps platforms accountable and gives producers and other rights holders the ability to negotiate a licence for that use. The need for transparency is twofold. It will assist rights holders as they navigate new licensing opportunities and help them to identify infringement when it occurs, but it is also necessary in assessing the validity of data, inherent biases within AI models, and helping to ensure that these systems are lawful and accountable.

Like all entrepreneurs, producers adapt to new tools that make their works more efficient and their productions more competitive. AI tools are no exception. They are already being used to streamline workflows and maximize efficiencies. The CMPA supports the use of AI in this operational context.

Recent efforts by AI platforms to define their own copyright rules exemplify a disturbing trend. Innovation is being pursued without consent from creators. This is a beg for forgiveness rather than ask for permission approach. OpenAI’s initial suggestion that users opt out of having their works used in Sora 2 is one such example. To echo comments made to this committee last week, an opt-out flips copyright on its head. What rights holders need is assurance that the Copyright Act will continue to uphold their right to voluntarily opt in to an equitable licensing arrangement. Transparency underpins their ability to do so.

[Alain Strati]

Upholding copyright, promoting a fair and vibrant licensing market and ensuring transparency are the necessary conditions for a healthy and competitive economy in the age of AI. Anything beyond that risks overstepping into areas the market can manage itself.

These measures don’t restrain innovation. They are the necessary preconditions to enable it. They ensure that AI grows on a foundation of trust, creativity and the rule of law.

Thank you. We look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Thank you.

I'll now give the floor to Jonathan Roberge and Étienne Grenier, who are representing the Chaire de recherche du Québec sur l'intelligence artificielle et le numérique francophones and who are both appearing by video conference.

You have five minutes for your remarks.

[Jonathan Roberge, Full Professor, Chaire de recherche du Québec sur l’intelligence artificielle et le numérique francophones]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to thank the committee for giving us the opportunity to speak today.

My name is Jonathan Roberge. I'm a full professor at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique, or INRS, where I also hold the Quebec research chair in francophone artificial intelligence and digital technology. Founded in 2024, the chair has three areas of research: first, the study of artificial intelligence ecosystems, particularly the impact of artificial intelligence on creative industries and the cultural sector; second, the issue of cultural content discoverability; and third, policy development, including at Canadian Heritage. This is all based on scientific expertise in the humanities and social sciences, which mainly stems from sociology, political science, law and communications. I previously held a Canada research chair for 10 years.

I mainly want to emphasize the need to develop public policies based on facts, research and expertise, particularly at Canadian Heritage. I'm saying this because, if we look at Canadian Heritage's track record, we don't see a growing body of research and expertise in this area, but rather a shortfall. This has almost become a hallmark of the department in Ottawa. I can give you the example of our two chairs. In 13 years of existence, they have never been given a research mandate by the Department of Canadian Heritage.

For example, if we look at the department's recent approach to addressing the impact of artificial intelligence on cultural industries, two main things stand out. First, when it comes to Canadian heritage, the government is biased towards artificial intelligence, often to the detriment of cultural industries. Take, for example, the consultation between Canadian Heritage and Mila, formerly known as the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms. The entire consultation process came to an abrupt end, since stakeholders in the cultural sector simply rejected the idea of building a cultural policy based on data licencing. We see the same work or the same lack of legitimacy in the consultation on copyright.

All this goes to show that Canadian cultural policies would be better equipped if they had a stronger foundation in research data. This issue also affects the government's ability to better understand the international environment, particularly the capacity to carry out comparative studies. For example, the French department of culture's strategy for artificial intelligence, a comprehensive document of around 30 pages with no Canadian equivalent, includes the stipulation that progress must be made in research and that impact studies must be carried out. Once again, Canadian Heritage doesn't take this approach, either in terms of consultations or scientific research.

On that note, I'll give the floor to my colleague.

[Étienne Grenier, Doctoral Student, Chaire de recherche du Québec sur l’intelligence artificielle et le numérique francophones]

Madam Chair and committee members, thank you for inviting me to appear before you.

I'll pick up where my colleague left off.

As Professor Jonathan Roberge pointed out, the Canadian government's latest consultations on artificial intelligence and culture have been techno‑centric. In other words, they have focused mainly on resolving the issues caused by the mining of cultural data by techno‑industrial workers in the artificial intelligence sector. This focus on text and data mining, a necessary part of technological development, creates a grey area that obscures the following issues.

First, how have cultural sector workers been affected since the introduction of this technology?

Second, how are emerging uses of artificial intelligence transforming cultural media?

Third, how can cultural sector workers and artists take control of the tool, meaning how can they influence the development of technology so that it serves their interests, at least in part?

It's high time to include cultural sector workers and artists in the consultation processes. They're on the front lines, day after day, inventing new ways to co‑exist with artificial intelligence. These efforts deserve government support.

Bear in mind that technical objects emerge from the convergence of different forces. In addition to industrial forces, we must take into account both users and advanced practitioners who modify these technologies by adapting them through experimental projects. Adapting to artificial intelligence technologies shouldn't be a one‑way street, starting with the techno‑industrial sector of artificial intelligence and ending with cultural sector workers. Instead, it should be a two‑way street, where innovators and users have a say. Cultural sector workers and artists have agency, and the government should support them in their efforts to reclaim their power.

That's why I want to point out the complete absence of the cultural sector in the Canadian sovereign AI compute strategy. This $2 billion project contributes to the exclusion of these stakeholders and positions them as mere passive adopters, ignoring their potential role in innovation and value creation. Yet initiatives to—

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Thank you. Your time is up, but you can provide more details later when answering questions.

We'll start now with our question round, so I'll turn to Mrs. Thomas for six minutes.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

With all due respect, Madam Chair, you forgot some witnesses.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Oh, did I miss someone? I'm so sorry.

We'll turn to our next witness.

We're joined by Laurent Dubois and Véronyque Roy from the Société des auteurs et autrices de radio, télévision et cinéma, or SARTEC.

Sorry for forgetting about you. You have five minutes to give your remarks.

[Laurent Dubois, Executive Director, Société des auteurs et autrices de radio, télévision et cinéma]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good afternoon, committee members.

My name is Laurent Dubois. I'm the proud executive director of the Société des auteurs et autrices de radio, télévision et cinéma, or SARTEC. I'm joined today by Véronyque Roy, lawyer and labour relations advisor.

SARTEC represents close to 1,700 scriptwriters from across Canada who write in French. Since 1949, we've been advocating for their socio‑economic rights and interests and helping to promote their vital contribution to Canada's culture, which makes our country so unique, enviable and attractive.

That's why we're grateful for the chance to speak today. We're especially concerned about how the development of generative artificial intelligence tools might affect our industry and especially the writers in our organization.

In early June, six Quebec unions representing almost 25,000 artists and technicians launched a manifesto entitled “Art is human!” This plea for the reasonable and rational development of artificial intelligence was warmly received in Canada and abroad. The Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, Steven Guilbeault, referred to it in his opening remarks at the latest UNESCO working session held in Paris last June.

This manifesto seeks to give artists a voice in a public debate dominated by companies focused on power and profit. These companies portray artificial intelligence as a revolution or a train to catch at all costs, or risk being left behind.

However, artificial intelligence isn't a revolution. It's certainly a major innovation, but it isn't a revolution. The concept of revolution implies making a clean break with the past in order to impose new paradigms and new rules.

Unions such as SARTEC spend years establishing minimum working conditions for artists. They do so through respectful social dialogue with their counterparts.

Members of Parliament like you spend months drafting, negotiating and enacting legislation designed to organize our society as best as possible by setting out the rights and obligations of every Canadian. Democracy is a long process involving consultations, discussions and compromises.

Will we now let a few major Silicon Valley companies encroach on our identity, our common good and our sovereignty?

Job losses, intellectual property theft and the misappropriation of protected content are the first measurable effects of this development. The recent theft of jewels from the Louvre museum in Paris made headlines. However, in the world of artificial intelligence, we're constantly seeing works of art being stolen in the name of innovation. In the same way that the French crown jewels will likely be cut up and melted down into precious metals, our works harvested by artificial intelligence are crumbled, stripped down and broken up to serve as precious raw material for creating new content devoid of any historical, emotional and human value and devoid of creative expertise.

Moreover, the impact of poorly regulated development of artificial intelligence goes beyond mere economic considerations. Artificial intelligence doesn't create. It recycles. It divides and conquers. The people who design and market the algorithms that shape artificial intelligence inevitably impose their judgments and values on these algorithms. The dominant discourse will continue to dominate. Minority voices will see the gap of inequality widen. The diversity of cultural expressions is threatened by a lack of profitability. As a result, Canada's cultural sovereignty is at stake.

We're calling on Canada to embrace this opportunity to show strong leadership in addressing this challenge and to remind everyone that art is human and must remain so. A strict and binding framework must be developed. Neither creators alone nor their small professional associations can take legal action to advocate for their rights against giants with virtually unlimited resources.

Solutions exist. They require a collaborative effort and a good dose of courage. They involve the simple concepts of authorization, transparency and compensation.

Authorization is necessary because creators must have the power to decide, through an explicit consent‑based approach, whether and under what conditions their works can be used.

Transparency is needed because artificial intelligence developers should be required to disclose the content used for training purposes. Transparency is also necessary in the case of content generated by artificial intelligence. This content should be labelled accordingly for the general public.

Lastly, compensation is necessary because it bears repeating that copyright also constitutes an economic right and the main source of income for writers.

We look forward to talking with you and answering your questions.

Thank you for listening.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Thank you, Mr. Dubois.

Now I turn to Mrs. Thomas for six minutes.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you so much.

Thank you to each of you for taking the time to be here today.

My first question is for Dr. Kearney. I'm hoping that you can just talk to me a bit about the gaming industry in Canada. I know that it punches above its weight in terms of creation. How is AI improving the world of gaming here within Canada?

[Alexandra Kearney]

Canada has a rich and varied tradition in making games. Of course, here in Edmonton, we have BioWare studios, which has produced many spin-out studios of its own, known for crafting and, really, honing narrative RPGs, narrative role-playing games, that have rich emotional connections that stand the test of time. It's something that players still engage with, even though some of these games are now quite old.

With respect to our technology and how it changes things, one thing that has limited game design in the past is that, if you cannot script or anticipate, at development time, what a player may choose to do, you can't create an outcome for that player choice. There's no ability to improvise based on contact with reality and the vast creativity of people who are playing games. Coming up with all those corner cases is, just simply, a challenge.

There's one test for games with this almost Dungeons and Dragons style of background that really speaks to people who are from that old narrative RPG background, which is this: Can you create “wish”? If you're familiar with Dungeons and Dragons or any of these old tabletop role-playing games, “wish” is something in which, typically, you have a human dungeon master who is interpreting the state of the game and what the players' intent is, and tries to figure out what's fair but still creates a challenge. Of course, with something as broad and open-ended as, “I want to make a wish and see what will happen”, that's, simply, something you just can't script. With our behaviour engine, we're actually able to do things of that nature. We're able to create scenarios in which a dungeon master is able to interpret a player's wants and reconcile it with the situation, so that still makes it feel agentically compelling for that person who is challenged by the game.

Moreover, we're able to make compelling characters who engage with people naturalistically. While a lot of things like, let's say, negotiation in games, typically come down to a skill check—so I'm going to do a roll of the dice, and it has nothing to do with my or your ability as a player to make a compelling argument—now we can create systems that are able to dynamically adapt on the fly, evaluate how compelling you actually are when you're trying to convince me of something in a game, and come up with an outcome that seems fair. These are just two examples of things that, just simply, couldn't be done with traditional methods, but that you can do by using generative intelligence.

This isn't replicating anything that is in prior works. We're not looking at Rothko paintings and then trying to do a style transfer. These are all emergent interpersonal agentic things that are being rendered out by the decision-making system.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you.

Can you just go a little deeper into how the industry has changed, prior to the use of AI to, now, using AI? In your opening remarks, you talked about the importance of protecting the ecosystem as a place where innovation and creativity can be spurred on. I would imagine there's a balance, then, as regulators consider what to do. Too much regulation could potentially thwart that; perhaps no regulation causes danger. Where is that balance in terms of making sure that the creative ecosystem and the ability to innovate are maintained?

[Alexandra Kearney]

With respect to the work we're doing, I just don't really see a threat to game studios, in a sense, and the work that we're doing because, fundamentally, what we're doing isn't replacing the work that a game studio would do. It's transformational in the sense that it allows them to do things that previously were impossible, things that they simply could not have done without this technology.

When I'm thinking about protecting them, as a Canadian who's advocating for studios in the art form, I really don't see, from an agentic side, what the strongest concerns might be. I struggle to see what these studios would be challenged by, in a way that might threaten their livelihood—if that makes sense.

One thing I do see that's positive is that, with a lot of these studios with agentic intelligence, they're able to punch way above their weight class, in the sense that there are a lot of small, independent Canadian studios that don't have access to vast amounts of capital, and games are very capital-intensive enterprises. When you think about some of these studios that are producing games that are heavy-hitting, in some cases it may take them—in extreme cases—over $1 billion to produce that game. That is capital that Canadians don't have access to, so we're locked out of that market. If we have tools that allow Canadians who are making games to actually push to market in a way that is differentiating, and that allow them to build expansive environments in a way that they previously weren't be able to, then I see that as something we should really be promoting.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Can you briefly expand on how AI gives greater opportunity to creatives in Canada?

[Alexandra Kearney]

In this case, again, a lot of the Canadian studios that are independent are quite small. By giving them access to technology that allows them to build in ways that previously weren't possible, they can differentiate themselves in a hyper-competitive market.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you.