Canadian Heritage

The House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage met to study the impact of artificial intelligence on creative industries. Appearing as witnesses were Michael Geist, a law professor; Véronique Guèvremont, a UNESCO chairholder; Chip Sutherland, an entertainment lawyer and artist manager; Nikita Roy, a data scientist and journalist; and Vicky Mochama, a communications director for PressForward.

Michael Geist argued that AI is already integral to creative processes and that restrictions on its use could be harmful. He warned that over-regulating AI in a copyright context could make Canada uncompetitive, as AI development would shift elsewhere, and that policies requiring minimum Canadian content in AI outputs could backfire by leading to the exclusion of Canadian content from large language models. He recommended transparency measures to distinguish human from AI-generated content, effective fair dealing rules, and opt-out systems that allow creators to choose whether their work is included in AI training data.

Véronique Guèvremont focused on the risks AI poses to cultural diversity, including homogenization from overrepresented anglophone and Western cultures in training data and reduced discoverability of human creations due to synthetic content flooding platforms. She highlighted threats to cultural rights, particularly for minorities and Indigenous peoples, and copyright concerns over uncompensated use of works. She called for regulatory frameworks that explicitly address cultural diversity, drawing on UNESCO conventions and recommendations, and suggested that synthetic content should not qualify for Canadian content designations.

Chip Sutherland identified three areas for government support: strong artist funding, reaffirming copyright protections with no exemptions for data mining as fair use, and formalizing a personality right in Canadian law to protect artists' voices and images from unauthorized use. He argued that artists should not have to opt out of having their work used; instead, AI companies should seek permission and compensation. He disagreed with Geist's characterization of AI use of creative works as not theft, asserting that using an artist's voice or image without consent crosses a clear line.

Nikita Roy described three shifts reshaping the information ecosystem: news becoming conversational, the collapse of search as a gateway to journalism, and AI interfaces becoming the new home page. She warned that if Canadian journalism is not built into AI answers, it becomes invisible, and that the greatest risk is invisibility, not just copyright infringement. She recommended protecting "context rights" (transparency, credit, and choice), investing in AI literacy for creators, and building a Canadian data commons—an ethically governed cultural data infrastructure reflecting Canada's diversity.

Vicky Mochama emphasized that news publishers rely on trust and direct connections with their communities, which AI summaries that scrape content without compensation or attribution undermine. She noted that AI tools can be useful for tasks like parsing public input or copy-editing, but generative AI poses threats by distributing false information, using content without payment or attribution, and breaking the link between newsrooms and audiences. She urged the committee to ensure any AI strategy does not undermine existing government supports for quality journalism.

During questions, Geist elaborated on the risks of repeating the mistakes of Bill C-18, where regulatory costs led to news blocking and reduced quality news. He argued that transparency should require AI companies to disclose what data is in their models so creators can know if their work is used. Sutherland stressed that artists' integrity and control over their work matter more than the size of any licensing payment. Roy noted that AI can amplify creativity and help people understand complex issues through conversation, but compensation for news creators is essential. Guèvremont called for legislation to address the specific risks AI poses to culture, including requiring transparency in training data and limiting how synthetic content competes with human-created works.

The committee unanimously adopted a motion, as amended, to invite the director of the Indigenous Art Centre and the authors of an audit report on missing Indigenous artworks to testify, and to request a government response to the committee's report under Standing Order 109.