[$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!
Mark Wilson announces a timely new online programme from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in his April 9, 2020 article for Fast Company (Note: Links have been removed).
Not every child will grow up to attend MIT, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get a jump start on its curriculum. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced millions of students to learn from home, MIT Media Lab associate professor Cynthia Breazeal has released [April 7, 2020] a website for K-12 students to learn about one of the most important topics in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics]: artificial intelligence.
The site provides 60 activities, lesson plans, and links to interactive AI experiments that MIT and companies like Google have developed in the past. Projects include coding robots to doodle, developing an image classifier (a tool that can identify images), writing speculative fiction to tackle the murky ethics of AI, and developing a chatbot (your grade schooler cannot possibly be worse at that task than I was). Everything is free, but schools are supposed to license lesson plans from MIT before adopting them.
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Various associated MIT groups are covering a wide range of topics including the already mentioned AI ethics, as well as, cyber security and privacy issues, creativity, and more. Here’s a little something from a programme for the Girl Scouts of America, which focused on data privacy and tech policy,
The Girl Scouts awarded the Brownie (7-9) and Junior (9-11) troops with Cybersecurity badges at the end of the full event. Credit: Daniella DiPaola [downloaded from https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/data-privacy-policy-to-practice-with-the-girl-scouts/]
You can find MIT’s AI education website here. While the focus is largely on children, it seems they are inviting adults to participate as well. At least that’s what I infer from what one of the groups associated with this AI education website, the LifeLong Kindergarten group states on their webpage,
The Lifelong Kindergarten group develops new technologies and activities that, in the spirit of the blocks and finger paint of kindergarten, engage people in creative learning experiences. Our ultimate goal is to foster a world full of playfully creative people, who are constantly inventing new possibilities for themselves and their communities.
The website is a little challenging with regard to navigation but perhaps these links to the Research Projects page will help you get started quickly or, for those who like to investigate a little further before jumping in, this News page (which is a blog) might prove helpful.
That’s it for today. I wish everyone a peaceful long weekend while we all observe as joyfully and carefully as possible our various religious and seasonal traditions. From my tradition to yours, Joyeuses Pâques!
Most people know this from experience. We laud creativity in theory while attempting to crush it in practice. If you doubt this, try launching a new idea at a meeting. In fact, trying to launch a new idea anywhere at any time is difficult as anyone who’s tried will tell you. Frustratingly, people don’t necessarily believe you when you point it out. They’re more likely to announce that the idea couldn’t have been much good in the first place or perhaps laugh at you because the idea seems so crazy or there’s dead silence because they can’t understand what you’re talking about. (Yes, I’ve had a few bad experiences.) So I was thrilled to see a study that confirms my experience. From the Sept. 3, 2011 news item on Science Daily, Why We Crave Creativity but Reject Creative Ideas,
The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don’t even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.
“How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?” said Jack Goncalo, ILR [Industrial and Labor Relations] School [at Cornell University] assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.
The studies’ findings include:
Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical — tried and true.
Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea.
For example, subjects had a negative reaction to a running shoe equipped with nanotechnology that adjusted fabric thickness to cool the foot and reduce blisters. [emphasis mine]
While I don’t always require a connection to nanotechnology in postings like this this, it’s nice to find one. And, I’m quite, quite surprised that people would not leap for joy at the thought of a shoe that would cool your foot and reduce the incidence of blisters. Who’d reject that? Apparently, more than one of us. Here’s more from the researchers,
“Our findings imply a deep irony,” wrote the authors, who also include Jennifer Mueller of the University of Pennsylvania and Shimul Melwani of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary.”
I hope I’ll have a chance to read the studies once they’re published and I hope the researchers will have the opportunity to tackle some other related questions such as why do we accept new ideas? If we rejected everything, we wouldn’t have agriculture, the wheel, money, etc. Plus, I also know that while I’m open to new ideas and have generated a few of my own, I have missed the boat on occasion. If I’d been in charge, there never would have been a camera included in a phone. By what means am I (or is anyone) more open to a new idea since the nanotechnology in the footwear wouldn’t be a problem for me but the phone camera was?
