Evidence of meeting #6 for Canadian Heritage in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was artists.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
No. This bill, Bill C-18, actually generated the terms that gave Google permission. We're not talking about stealing. Google owns it. That's the agreement.
That's the agreement the government facilitated. My concern is that with digital-first creators and other artists who exist online, the same thing will happen to them if the government gets overzealous and over-regulates AI.
Director, Innovation, Alliances and Futurs, Sporobole, ArtIA
Another option would be to finance a public AI.
Director, Innovation, Alliances and Futurs, Sporobole, ArtIA
Can we own our own infrastructure? Can we own compute power—
Conservative
Director, Innovation, Alliances and Futurs, Sporobole, ArtIA
In Canada, the research infrastructure for AI has compute power. It's called Canada compute, Quebec compute. They are non-profits that administer compute power for research centres. It's available to all researchers.
Why don't we have a public system or a system that is owned in common by artists and arts organizations and that provides that kind of service to the cultural sector?
Director, Innovation, Alliances and Futurs, Sporobole, ArtIA
No. It's not the government that owns and operates it. It's the non-profits that own and operate it.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
They have that ability right now. They have that opportunity.
Conservative
Director, Innovation, Alliances and Futurs, Sporobole, ArtIA
Not everything is in the free market.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
Right now, there is an opportunity. If anyone wants a space online, they have a space online. If anybody wants to come up with an AI model, they have the ability to come up with an AI model right now.
Director, Innovation, Alliances and Futurs, Sporobole, ArtIA
Two weeks ago, NVIDIA invested $400 billion in OpenAI. No, it's not a free market.
Liberal
Liberal
Fares Al Soud Liberal Mississauga Centre, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you all for taking the time to join us today.
I quite literally just met with members from various organizations representing Canada's book sector as part of the day on the Hill. They're actually in this room as we speak. I'll give a quick nod to them and to the great work they do.
We also spoke of Copibec and the work they do. When I met with them earlier this summer, they described us committee members as “guardians” of Canadian culture. I think we'll all agree that it's a very generous way of looking at us members of this committee. Protecting Canadian cultural sovereignty while understanding the inevitability of AI is our priority, though. That is quite literally the role we hold as members of this committee.
During our discussion, they clearly stated that the goal was to develop a framework for artificial intelligence and Canadian culture to be partners.
I now turn to the head of ArtIA, whose mission statement is to develop the infrastructure, tools and skills for Canada's cultural sector to become a global leader in responsible artificial intelligence.
You've positioned yourself to ensure that artists have a say in how artificial intelligence shapes creative practices. We often talk about a human-centred approach to artificial intelligence.
In your opinion, Mr. Ducharme, what does true cultural sovereignty look like in this area? What would it take for Canada to be a leader in establishing ethical standards of artificial intelligence for the arts, rather than simply adapting to what's already being done?
Director, Innovation, Alliances and Futurs, Sporobole, ArtIA
In our opinion, artificial intelligence in the field of Canadian culture should be managed within a governance framework that would be created and administered by people who work in culture. This framework should be flexible, scalable and adaptable to certain cultural communities, particularly indigenous and minority language communities.
We think there should be networks of laboratories across Canada that would look at artificial intelligence issues and allow creators to go out and experiment. These laboratories would also allow them to make decisions about how they want to protect their own data and works. That's not currently the case.
For years, Facebook and Instagram have encouraged artists to publish their works of art on Instagram. These works were extracted entirely by scraping data for use to drive models. So there were lies and theft. Silicon Valley has been doing that for a very long time, as I said in my opening remarks.
So we believe that governance is really at the root of all this. In order to develop governance frameworks, you have to bring people together. We must ensure that there are places where human beings, in this case artists, can come together and make decisions about policies that affect them.
We're not asking the Canadian government to make decisions for artists. We're asking that artists have the autonomy and funding to provide a counterweight to American economic power, which is so vast that it pulls the rug out from under us every time we try to take a step. That's our biggest problem.
Basically, the ArtIA project was funded through a grant from the Quebec government to help us understand the effects of artificial intelligence. We see that all of a sudden the Americans are investing heavily in this area. They do it with capital from Silicon Valley, but they also do it by polluting heavily, consuming natural resources and destroying cultural resources in communities. For example, we see a lot of indigenous art being created by artificial intelligence, by creators who aren't indigenous. So it's a very dangerous cultural appropriation.
As a francophone, I have no artificial intelligence model that represents me. Current models can mimic my language, but they can't understand my cultural specificity. I'm a Quebecker, so it's not too bad, but an Acadian person has a cultural and linguistic specificity that's very different from that of Quebec. Less data on Acadian culture was collected by harvesting, which makes the biases even stronger.
What about a queer artist or a Jamaican-Canadian artist, for example? What about the people who exist at truly complex intersections of our societies, where models, with their biases, end up acting as real homogenizers of culture?
So our position is to let the artists take over, and to do that we would have to invest in those policies.
Liberal
Fares Al Soud Liberal Mississauga Centre, ON
Thank you very much, Mr. Ducharme.
Mr. Rogers, it's great to see you again. Thank you for your opening remarks.
Music Canada has been clear about protecting rights in this streaming era. You mentioned this in your opening remarks. Now the AI era may be even more disruptive. How is Music Canada preparing to protect both investment and artistic integrity, without repeating the same inequities that left artists undercompensated in the last digital shift?
Chief Executive Officer, Music Canada
Chair, I thank the member for the question.
It's good to see you.
When it comes to AI, the way out of the piracy era was that our members, up against the odds, held out and said that music had value. In a period of time in which music was stolen or given away for free, we said that we believed there would be a time in which people pay for music again.
I believe this to be true. I'd be very excited to put this in Hansard. I've been saying it for a while. I believe that music is the only thing in the world that everyone did for free, and then people started to pay for it. Then people stopped paying for it. Now, they pay for it again. This is a human success story. I think it is one worth protecting.
My greatest regret at the beginning of the AI boom was hearing people say that AI was not a copyright issue and not recognizing it as the massive red flag that it was, but it is the copyright issue of our generation.
That's how we're going about it.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Lisa Hepfner
That was perfect timing. Thank you very much, Mr. Rogers.
Mr. Champoux, you have the floor for six minutes, unless you are sharing part of your time with your colleague.
Bloc
Martin Champoux Bloc Drummond, QC
I'm going to take all the time you give me, Madam Chair. Thank you very much.
Thank you to all the witnesses. Frankly, it's always fascinating, interesting, and very informative to hear them talk about the all-important issue of artificial intelligence and its impact on the cultural sector.
We're hearing a lot of concerns from people in all sectors of the cultural community. What's happening is very worrisome. However, I don't want to paint an entirely bleak picture of the situation. I think there are some very interesting things about artificial intelligence. However, I think we need to tell ourselves the real story and realize the risks associated with artificial intelligence for the cultural sector, particularly creators.
Mr. Ducharme, I'm going to start with you. Your arguments in support of an artificial intelligence engine that would be local and owned by people from the cultural industry are really interesting. It's an idea, a model. I'm curious, though. In the past, search engines from Quebec or Canada have tried to emerge, for example broadcasting platforms. Even now, people are trying to set up a digital broadcasting platform. These are great ideas, and we'd like to see them flourish. Unfortunately, these companies are competing so hard with international companies, particularly U.S. companies, that they're not likely to be successful enough to generate what we want them to generate.
In the case of an artificial intelligence engine, I remain hopeful because much of the research that led to the development of artificial intelligence was done in Montreal, Quebec, particularly by Mila, with Mr. Bengio and all his colleagues. I tell myself that there's hope, since we developed this technology here.
Tell me how, in the case of an artificial intelligence engine, it would be different from other attempts we've made in the past to compete with Internet giants.
Director, Innovation, Alliances and Futurs, Sporobole, ArtIA
There are several elements to your question.
Our goal isn't to develop an artificial intelligence model or engine, as you call it, but rather to focus on the governance of these tools and the infrastructures that make their creation possible.
What we're finding is that creators aren't necessarily using ChatGPT, DALL-E, or generative artificial intelligence systems for image production. They use all kinds of artificial intelligence tools. They use them to locate bodies in space as part of a dance show, for example, or to control systems in a performance or in a festival. Artificial intelligence isn't just used for content generation. It can be used for several purposes, such as data management. My colleagues who are here with me have given other examples.
We want to be able to experiment. Artists want to be able to understand how artificial intelligence impacts their work and the creation of their own value, that is, the value they bring to market. As a result, they want to know what the rules are behind that. Silicon Valley's rules are opaque; we don't know them. Not only are they opaque, but they are constantly changing.
I'll give you an example. A few years ago, many artists from here and elsewhere contributed to the development of an application by RunwayML. It was free, it was good. We worked with it and everyone gave each other hugs. It was perfect, it was great. One day, artists received an email telling them that they no longer had access to their work. Everything they'd put on the platform no longer belonged to them. The rules had changed.
AI rules and models are constantly changing. We can never rely on the development of this technology, because it's in its infancy. It started just a few years ago, and yet we're overwhelmed by it. That's the Silicon Valley model: They give us everything for free, and then they pull the rug out from under us.
Bloc
Martin Champoux Bloc Drummond, QC
So the difference in this case is that we would retain access to the content we use to feed the animal, if you will, and the rights attached to it.