[$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!
[$40 CAD early tickets available until 11:59 pm PST April 15, 2026 *April 22, 2026* $60 CAD standard tickets available until 9:69 pm PST April 30, 2926]
Vancouver AI is a neural network of curious humans bridging creative and technical spaces. We cultivate a commons where community values shape governance and prototypes become shared tools.
This month, we bring the AI Ethical Futures Lab to the main stage with two talks that ask hard questions about how we measure what matters in the AI age.
In a world of black-box algorithms and corporate capture, we are cultivating a commons. A space where prototypes become shared tools and community values become governance. We move from ephemeral noise to perpetual knowledge.
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The Lineup
Chiyakselut aka Venessa Gonzales and Makaidea Gonzales: Squamish Nation
chiyakselut (Venessa Gonzales) and her daughter Makaidea Gonzales open with a Squamish West Coast traditional welcome song and blessing rooted in multi-generational knowledge.
Venessa’s lineage bridges three nations: Squamish, Musqueam, and Cree from Saskatchewan. She harvests traditional medicines and teas, creates salves for healing ailments, and practices traditional arts… glass etching, wool weaving, cedar weaving. She teaches traditional games, ensuring cultural knowledge flows to the next generation.
Makaidea’s presence embodies that flow: daughter learning alongside mother, carrying forward what ceremony means.
Martin Lopatka: Valtech “Rawlsian Agents: An Application of LLMs to Forge Fairer Bilateral Agreements”
Operationalizing John Rawls’ theory of justice through modern agentic workflows. Examining how AI systems can simulate contract negotiation while exploring both the promise and pitfalls of AI-mediated fairness.
Technology leader and applied researcher at Valtech working at the intersection of machine learning, AI ethics, and technology policy moving responsible AI from principle to practice in complex organizations. Ph.D. in forensic statistics from the University of Amsterdam.
Contributes to policy efforts including the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, and OWASP Top 10 for LLMs. Active in the privacy-enhancing technologies community.
Ethics for the AI Age: Current ethical frameworks struggle to evaluate AI systems that absorb massive resources while their impact on human flourishing remains unmeasured.
Sev introduces a quantifiable approach to moral accounting… frameworks for economic systems that measure care and relational contribution rather than productivity alone.
Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at PolarGrid, building North America’s first real-time AI inference compute network. Co-founded the Economy of Wisdom Foundation to develop alternative economic frameworks that measure care and fulfillment rather than traditional productivity metrics.
His work bridges 20+ years of scaling mission-critical systems with new economic paradigms for the AI transformation ahead.
Sev asks: what if we measured care instead of productivity? Martin asks: can AI help us be fairer? Same underlying question… different frameworks. Stay for the closing dialogue where they go head-to-head.
Two Vancouver students who turned a cookie side hustle into a legit operation. Aliza founded iBlush LipGloss; Noa has 200K+ TikTok followers. Together they run Slapd Treats and they’ve been feeding Vancouver AI since last year. Expect cookies.
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THE SPONSORS
Big thanks to the folks helping keep the lights on, the doors open, and the community infrastructure real:
Intellomx: Simon Haworth’s crew Intellomx is an AI-powered drug discovery platform that analyzes transcriptomic, genomic, and proteomic data to save up to 90% of pre-clinical development costs (recently joined J&J Innovation JLABS). Huge thanks for backing the ecosystem from the deep science end.
TheUpgrade.ai: AI training company walking the walk on democratizing AI skills: Fortune 500 workshops, creative pro certifications, and corporate training that doesn’t treat people like idiots. They help organizations and individuals harness AI to amplify creativity and accelerate learning through practical, hands-on training
Creative Mornings Vancouver: 14 years building Vancouver’s creative community since before “community building” was a LinkedIn buzzword, and they let us cross-pollinate networks because they get that rising tides lift all boats.
HR MacMillan Space Centre: Our venue partner who hosts us every month and doesn’t kick us out when conversations run past 10 PM. They’re Vancouver’s gateway to innovation and space education, making science accessible to everyone from kids to cosmos-obsessed adults.
Ethos Lab: Vancouver’s Black + Indigenous youth-led studio on Main St where teens ship real products. Running AI Studios + Friday Night AI Experimentation Labs (Jan–Jun 2026) for BIPOC youth (14–24), plus the Blackathon in February honouring Hogan’s Alley.
You can purchase your tickets from the April 29, 2026 event page. Enjoy!
