Canadian Heritage

Opening remarks

Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to contribute to your study on the impact of artificial intelligence on the creative sector. My name is Travis Croken, and I'm an author and the national co-chair of the Canadian Authors Association. Artificial intelligence is transforming the world around us, the creative sector included. While it offers tools that can assist artists, writers and other creatives, it also poses serious risks, threatening to undermine cultural diversity, intellectual property and ethical rights, and the creative market. I will centre my remarks on three key points. The first is intellectual and ethical rights. The Canadian Authors Association was created over 100 years ago, largely to advocate for the protection of authors and copyright. Here we are still discussing the same issues on a much larger scale with little room for error. Copyright was created to ensure the protections of creative works and to ensure creatives continued their work. Why pour time, heart and soul into a project if it can be disseminated without appropriate compensation and control? The use of copyright-protected materials to train AI datasets…

Opening remarks

Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Diane Davy, and I am the executive director of Work in Culture, which is the popular name for the Cultural Careers Council Ontario, which is quite a mouthful. Work in Culture is a non-profit arts service organization. Its mission is “to advance the careers of artists, creatives, and cultural workers from diverse lived experiences, and support the organizations that engage them, through entrepreneurial and business skills development and innovative research.” We are best known across the creative sector for our job board, which is the most popular arts and culture job board in the country. In addition to the job board, we develop and deliver a wide variety of training programs, both in-person and virtual, and do related research on an ongoing basis. We recently published a report, “AI for Administration in Ontario's Creative Industries: A Snapshot of Current Use, Concerns, and Considerations”, which seeks to explore and understand the specific potential of AI tools for business operations and administration in Ontario's creative industries. The study asked how organizations and…

Opening remarks

Madam Chair and members of the committee, my name is Marie‑Christine Morin, and I am the executive director of the Fédération culturelle canadienne-française, also known as the FCCF. I'm joined today by my colleague Sven Buridans, director of innovation and digital partnerships. I would like to thank the committee for inviting us to testify. For nearly 50 years, the FCCF has been the national political voice of the artistic and cultural sector of the Canadian and Acadian francophonie. Our sector plays a major economic role in Canada, accounting for more than $5.8 billion in gross domestic product and generating more than 36,000 jobs across the country in 2022. That's how important it is for local economic development and job creation.

Opening remarks

Last month, we delved into the topic of artificial intelligence, or AI, at the All In event held in Montreal. Our exchanges with key players in the Canadian ecosystem confirmed two things: first, a genuine interest on the part of the technological community in cultural issues; second, the concerning realization that arts and culture are still absent from AI funding channels. Non-profit cultural organizations, which carry out a public interest mission, don't have access to funding programs like Scale AI's. By neglecting the arts and culture sector, Canada is missing out on a critical innovation hub and its creative, ethical and critical perspective on AI. Earlier this month, we were also at the UNESCO Mondiacult conference, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, in Barcelona, alongside the Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, or CDEC. This historic meeting led to a final statement, signed by over 120 ministers of culture around the world. It lists AI as one of the priority areas of action for states. This statement is consistent with the vision of the CDEC and the FCCF. It commits states to promoting the discoverability of…

Opening remarks

Thank you, Madam Chair. My name is Kevin Chan. I am the director of public policy at Meta. I'm here with my colleague, Rachel Curran. Meta employs more than 3,000 people in offices across the country, including in our AI lab in Montreal. Most Canadians use at least one of our family of apps to share with family and friends, discover businesses and connect over things that interest them. Our apps empower hundreds of thousands of Canadian businesses, artists and creators every month to reach new audiences and grow. Approximately 98% of the Canadian businesses using our platforms are small businesses and 55% are female-led. Meta is also investing significantly in foundation AI models and generative AI. For example, Llama, our AI foundation model, is the leading open-source model, with over one billion downloads today. Just as anyone can freely use our family of apps to connect and create, we believe AI technology should be accessible to all. At Meta, we have employed an open-source approach. That means making our AI models like Llama freely available for anyone to download, use, modify and build upon so that researchers and businesses of all sizes can customize and deploy these…

Opening remarks

I'm happy to take that one. We build AI systems that help us identify underage users on our platforms. They read signals from users, whether they be the content they're interacting with or their friend networks, and look at things like birthday posts, of course, with identifying information removed. The systems look at a variety of signals to determine whether someone is underage or not. If we think a user is underage—under 18—we proactively place them in a much more restrictive experience that we have built for youth, and we require that they prove to us that they are over 18 before we let them out of it. Our AI systems are helping us determine whether users are in the right experience for their age or not.

Opening remarks

Thanks. With the ACP, I'm representing a firm, Annick Press. We're a children's press based out of Toronto. We've been in business for 50 years and publish authors and illustrators from coast to coast to coast. We are finding some corporate, production and operational efficiencies through the use of AI tools. Some of those tools are Canadian. De Marque out of Quebec makes some excellent tools. Book Connect from Nova Scotia is implementing AI elements into their platform that we use to send our digital data out into the marketplace. We're also using some American tools. What I would say in general about them is that they are respecting our copyright. They are walled gardens. What makes us hesitant to engage in licensing arrangements, where we are otherwise very active in the international licensing market, is that our content has been stolen. A recent piracy scan shows there are over 5,000 links to our content online right now. Many of those are Facebook URLs. Additionally, many of them are links to libraries that are documented to have been used in the training of such large language models as Llama. We take a cautious approach to this emerging marketplace. We look to…