Tag Archives: Kei Baritugo

AI’s Real Cost: Creative Power vs. Planetary Limits (a Vancouver [Canada] AI Community Meetup on November 26, 2025)

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A November 19, 2025 invitation to the upcoming Vancouver AI meetup arrived via email, Note: I have made some structural changes to the notice but the text is untouched,

Friends,

Every prompt costs water. Every image generation burns coal somewhere. We’ve been building in the cloud pretending it’s ethereal, but the cloud has a ground truth and it’s thirsty as hell.

Nov 26 [2025[ we’re getting specific about solutions.

Creative power vs. planetary limits.

The machines are thirsty, consuming water like never before while we build creative tools.

Join us for a raw conversation about AI’s double-edged reality: the creative revolution happening in your pocket versus the environmental reckoning happening in our backyards.

​We’ll explore how Vancouver’s creative community can lead by example… from indigenous-led data sovereignty to local compute clusters that heat your neighbor’s home.

…

​Creative Power vs. Planetary Limits explores the tension between AI’s: explosive creative potential and its real-world environmental costs.

​Let’s dig into water and energy use in data centers, corporate responsibility, and community-led alternatives like indigenous-governed data and compute, heat recapture, and edge/local clusters.

Liz Marshall – Documentary filmmaker investigating AI’s water and energy footprint and the human-planet health link, from Great Lakes data center buildouts to right-to-water movements.

Kei Baritugo – Montreal AI Ethics Institute strategist highlighting power gaps and pushing for AI as an assistive tool, transparency, and policy that protects creative labor.

Kevin Friel – AI filmmaker advancing ethical, local-first production workflows, from edge compute to heat reuse, and championing accountable tools like carbon impact tracking.

Amanda Silvera – Amanda founded the Society for Original Biometric Identity Rights (SOBIR) and Sobir Technologies (SOBIRTECH), two initiatives focused on protecting human voice identity and building ethical frameworks for biometric rights.

Catherine Warren (moderator) – Entertainment and innovation leader with climate physics roots, former CEO of Vancouver Economic Commission, and founder of Fan Trust, steering ethical AI and sustainability across media.

Get tickets →

This isn’t another panel where everyone agrees AI is “transformative.” This is about reconciling the creative revolution with planetary reality.

Bring your questions, your skepticism, and your ideas for what we build next.

…

PS: Vancouver AI is just one node. BC + AI Ecosystem is building province-wide infrastructure for ethical AI development. Membership gets you into the real conversations, not just the public ones.

Here is some logistical information from the event page,

Agenda:

​Doors Open: 6pm
Food, networking, open bar: 6-7pm
Program Begins: 7pm
Program Ends: 9pm
Desert, drinks, astronomy: 9-10pm
Event Ends: 10pm

​Program Details:

​7-715pm: Squamish Nation Welcome: Is’gh’li-ya Anthony Josesph
715-730: Community Announcements
730-745: “Watts Up?” Lionel Ringenbach
745-830: “AI’s Real Cost: Creative Power vs. Planetary Limits” panel
830-845: AI Climate Paradox Discussion
845-900: BC + Updates and Wrap-Up

​** No experience required. Curiosity is the only prerequisite.

The price of a standard ticket is $60.00.