[$60 CAD standard tickets available until 12 am PT May 28, 2926]
Building the AI Commons is about the tools, archives, models, stories, standards, and institutions that still belong to everybody.
It is about keeping knowledge open without letting culture get strip-mined. It is about creative AI that has taste, consent, and fingerprints. It is about public memory. It is about refusing a future where five companies own the interface to reality.
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THE LINEUP
Andrea Mills, Internet Archive Canada Preserving the Open Internet
Andrea is the Executive Director of Internet Archive Canada, 20 years in and still quietly doing some of the most important infrastructure work in the country. While everyone else is locking knowledge behind paywalls, Andrea and the team are archiving the open internet, digitizing collections, and building public AI infrastructure with datasets that actually belong to the public.
Earlier this year, Brewster Kahle and Andrea announced the BC Data Center is live and ready for scale — building data mining hubs for public AI, climate models, and large language models for small languages. This is what open source looks like at the institutional level.
Dr. Rachel Horst, UBC Master of Educational Technology Building an Anti-Slop Fiction Machine: What AI Reveals About Creative Processing
Dr. Horst on her AI Fiction Machine: an 8-agent system she built for Hyperstition’s AI fiction contest, which generates fully automated short fiction at about $30 a story.
The system slows AI down, forces it to review its own work, and embraces what LLMs do uniquely well instead of imitating human writing.
She will walk through the architecture, the creative philosophy behind it, and what it taught her about authorship, voice, and where the human actually lives in an automated pipeline.
Rachel Horst is a futures-focused educator and researcher, working at the intersection of creative AI, writing, and hyperstition, the idea that fictions can become reality through collective belief. She was selected as a finalist in Hyperstition’s AI fiction contest, where she built an 8-agent system that writes short stories end-to-end. Her work treats AI as a creative amplifier rather than a shortcut, and asks what new authorship looks like when the craft moves from the sentence to the system.
Kris Krüg, BC + AI Ecosystem Association Canadian Center for Ethical and Creative AI
Ethics and creativity are not two separate conversations. They are both culture. The programmers and geeks build the tools. The artists and cultural workers figure out what to do with them and what they mean.
That has always been the deal, and it is the deal again now. In this talk, Kris Krüg makes the case for a federally funded Canadian Center for Ethical and Creative AI: a public home for the artists, technologists, ethicists, and communities doing the actual cultural work of this moment.
Not a lab. Not a panel. An institution with a mandate, a budget, and a long memory. Canada has the talent, the values, and the opening. What we are missing is the building.
Kris Krüg is a Vancouver-based creative technologist and community builder working at the intersection of AI, ethics, and the creative industries.
He leads the BC + AI Ecosystem Association, a nonprofit AI community of around three hundred members across the province, and runs the AI Ethical Futures Lab, a working group on responsible AI deployment.
He teaches AI to PR and communications professionals, creative practitioners, and ethics teams, and partners with organizations across film, media, and the public sector on how to use these tools without losing what matters.
THE FLOW
Doors at 6:00. Program starts at 7:00. Everybody out by 10:00. Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.
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You can purchase your tickets from the May 27, 2026 event page. Enjoy!
