This is an extremely concerning question that I've been working on for a few years—the question of how AI will impact research in general, especially Canadian research institutions. It's what we would call—and what we're working on under the term—“epistemic sovereignty”, which is the ability of a country or a community to be able to control the knowledge environment and how knowledge is produced. That's an important question, not only for researchers in the sciences and humanities but also for people working in government and for businesses. How do you translate information into knowledge and then into action in the world?
This is a huge concern. We don't know how a lot of these models are trained exactly. We don't necessarily know what kind of data they're being trained on. There have been many examples of intentional insertion of certain types of data to skew results towards one narrative or another. These are all major concerns.
In terms of how we could govern this, we need to think first about what we want our knowledge environment to look like. This is what I would say across the board on what we're doing with AI. What do we actually want the results to look like? What are the long-term goals? Then, we come up with solutions based on that.
Part of that would be thinking about the kinds of monopolies that control our information environment and our knowledge environment. This is very obvious in the big-tech sector, but in the research sector, in particular, there are only a few companies—they're all multinationals; none of them are Canadian companies—that own the vast majority of academic copyright. They also are developing AI tools to access and process that information from that copyright.
This is what our entire research and education system is built on at the university level, and this is a major concern.