01:16:35 L G: Hello, everyone, and welcome to City Center Library. 01:16:40 L G: I respectfully acknowledge that this panel takes place on the ancestral, traditional, and unceded territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen, Peek'ite, and Musqueam First Nations, and on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Tsawwatha Nation. 01:16:58 L G: Hello. 01:16:59 L G: We have a permanent display of introduced riders downstairs on the 2nd Floor. 01:17:05 L G: So other things to keep in mind, if you driven here and parked downstairs below in P 1, congratulations on surviving the chaos. 01:17:14 L G: We also have a parking kiosk that you do need to put your license plate in on the 1st Floor for two, three hours of parking. 01:17:21 L G: So just making sure that happens. 01:17:24 L G: Around the corner in the hallway is our washroom. 01:17:29 L G: There is a code which is just right there near the door if you need to access that. 01:17:33 L G: There's also water dispensers, and we have refreshments at that table over there. 01:17:40 L G: I would like to welcome you to this panel, Reality Check, Misinformation Manipulation, and the Community of the Public presented in partnership with Open Media. 01:17:56 L G: I would like to introduce you to Krzyszka Kiros who is operations manager director of Open Media. 01:18:07 L G: Thank you. 01:18:08 L G: And I'll let her. 01:18:10 L G: That's good. 01:18:11 L G: Thank you so much, Naomi. 01:18:13 L G: Okay. 01:18:13 L G: So verifying. 01:18:15 L G: We're good? 01:18:16 L G: Okay. 01:18:16 L G: Cool. 01:18:18 L G: Hello to everybody and everybody online. 01:18:23 L G: I'm happy to announce that definitely we are officially starting the panel discussion. 01:18:28 L G: As Naomi said, it's titled reality check, misinformation manipulation, and the Canadian public. 01:18:35 L G: This panel is part of the showing of the classroom exhibit. 01:18:41 L G: It's a multimedia exhibit that is actually taking place. 01:18:46 L G: It's hosted at the Surrey Libraries Clayton branch right now until August 23. 01:18:55 L G: So you still have time to to get over there and pick it up. 01:18:59 L G: I want to to thank mentioning the libraries, Naomi Morgan, as well as, he's not here, but Michael Hunc. 01:19:08 L G: He is the librarian contact that we have over there at Clayton. 01:19:13 L G: Naomi's here at the city city center library. 01:19:16 L G: And we also wanna thank, because they're in the same building, the Clayton Community Center that has the exhibit space for for us here. 01:19:27 L G: And we also thank Tactical Tech, the organization from Europe that is the one that is sharing with us the materials for that that exhibit for us to be able to bring it over here to BC. 01:19:44 L G: And let's see. 01:19:45 L G: As Naomi said, again, my name is Francesca Clios. 01:19:48 L G: I am the oh, OpenMedia's operations director and the moderator for today. 01:19:56 L G: OpenMedia, as you may know, is is a Canadian digital rights advocacy nonprofit organization that works to keep the Internet open, affordable, and surveillance free. 01:20:13 L G: It's it's been our part of our mission and vision since since the get go. 01:20:20 L G: And we create community driven campaigns to engage, educate, and empower people to safeguard the Internet as well as community engagement programs such as this one. 01:20:31 L G: And, also, there's a series of conversations that we've been hosting known as, riffraffs, chats. 01:20:40 L G: They're moderated by Jenna Fung, our policy management engagement manager. 01:20:46 L G: And Matt Hatfield over there, is also a moderator with her for those conversations. 01:20:55 L G: And today, he's going to be for all those online, he's gonna be moderating the online conversation, and he's gonna be be the keeper of the questions until we get to the frequently not frequently asked questions or the question and answer section. 01:21:12 L G: So a couple of things to add to Naomi's logistics. 01:21:17 L G: Please note that we will keep some time about thirty minutes at the end of the this conversation for the question and answer section. 01:21:28 L G: If you're joining us online, please post your questions in the chat section of preconference, or you can also post them in Slido, either one. 01:21:41 L G: And for those of you in person, which is a large crowd, which is really awesome, If you have any questions, please hold them. 01:21:51 L G: Write them down. 01:21:51 L G: Don't forget them until we get to the the if the q and a. 01:21:57 L G: Same. 01:21:58 L G: There. 01:21:58 L G: Q and a. 01:22:01 L G: Also, please make sure that your phones are either off or vibrating. 01:22:05 L G: I know some people do need their phones for family and other other reasons, so vibrating will be fine. 01:22:14 L G: And one last thing, we have a hard stop at 07:30. 01:22:19 L G: So please if you see that we're running longer, just just remind me. 01:22:23 L G: We'll we'll keep track of that. 01:22:26 L G: Yes. 01:22:27 L G: So I am very excited to have these three awesome panelists join us for for the conversation. 01:22:37 L G: It's, yeah, it's it's an honor, and it's really cool to to meet you all in in different ways and different circles. 01:22:46 L G: Let's say that. 01:22:48 L G: I wanna introduce you first. 01:22:50 L G: I guess I will take her. 01:22:54 L G: Let's let's start with it. 01:22:55 L G: Let's start with it. 01:22:57 L G: Okay. 01:22:58 L G: Spanish. 01:23:00 L G: Iceland. 01:23:01 L G: Ashley. 01:23:01 L G: Ashley. 01:23:02 L G: Yep. 01:23:02 L G: I've gotta chill first name. 01:23:04 L G: Ashley. 01:23:04 L G: Yeah. 01:23:05 L G: Ashley Jackson. 01:23:07 L G: She is their staff lawyer at BCCLA's policy department, working primarily on privacy, digital policy, police accountability, and free expression issues. 01:23:20 L G: They studied computer science and linguistics at UBC and attended law school at the University of Toronto where they were coeditor in chief of the Indigenous Law Journal and a student caseworker in the family law and residential tenancy departments of the school of the local the the yeah. 01:23:41 L G: The school's legal. 01:23:42 L G: There you go. 01:23:45 L G: They started their legal career in the 3 D 7 area representing First Nations in a variety of areas of law and later practice family and states law in the Lower Mainland, serving legal aid clients and two s LGBT plus families before joining BCCLA in 2023. 01:24:07 L G: Cool. 01:24:08 L G: That's. 01:24:11 L G: Yep. 01:24:11 L G: So Katherine Reilly is a digital literacy expert in the school of communication at Simon Fraser University. 01:24:23 L G: She is the author of communing data literacy tools and concepts for social engagement, which is available as an open access publication from Queen Medaille University Press. 01:24:36 L G: It is the winner of the 2026 Gertrude J. 01:24:41 L G: Robinson Prize from the Canadian Communications Association. 01:24:45 L G: So congratulations. 01:24:48 L G: And now, Garrick Garrick Aceh. 01:24:53 L G: Aceh. 01:24:54 L G: Aceh. 01:24:56 L G: Aceh is a long time worker in the video game industry as well as a political organizer, independent writer and designer, and nature photographer. 01:25:06 L G: They have a keen interest in strengthening Canada's democratic culture and institutions and in improving improving the underlying decision making systems of our communities and our society. 01:25:20 L G: Cool. 01:25:21 L G: So that's them. 01:25:23 L G: And we yeah. 01:25:27 L G: One part that I forgot also to say in terms of logistics, the bathroom is on the whole next two rooms, two rooms away, and the code is right on that door if you need to get in. 01:25:42 L G: Okay. 01:25:42 L G: So I wanna start with just a a quick question that goes directly to the three of you. 01:25:50 L G: What is the most recent misleading and or incorrect piece of information perhaps generated by AI that you have run across? 01:25:58 L G: Something that, in your opinion, could negatively impact members of our community or all of us. 01:26:07 L G: I've got a doozy. 01:26:08 L G: Okay. 01:26:10 L G: So as a faculty member at the university, I'm often approached by people who would like to do graduate studies. 01:26:18 L G: And this year, I was approached by someone who wanted to do a PhD, and they wanted to work with me. 01:26:25 L G: And so they shared their ideas about what they wanted to do, and we had some conversations. 01:26:29 L G: And I said, okay. 01:26:31 L G: Great. 01:26:33 L G: Well, now that we've talked this through a bit, could you write this up into a proposal? 01:26:38 L G: And I got the proposal some weeks later, and I thought, oh, this looks really good. 01:26:43 L G: Until I got to the bibliography and noticed that I had a citation there that claimed to be written by me, but didn't exist in this world. 01:26:55 L G: So the AI had tabulated. 01:26:57 L G: It had generated the citation think thinking that it sounded like something I may have written, but they hadn't. 01:27:05 L G: And this was sad because at that point, we had to refuse entry to this individual who wanted to study. 01:27:13 L G: And so that makes me a bit worried because they they really did have great ideas and a lot of ambition, but got caught up in this system that we are this new information and ecology that we're experiencing. 01:27:30 L G: Yeah. 01:27:34 L G: Okay. 01:27:36 L G: Yeah. 01:27:37 L G: I can go. 01:27:37 L G: Yeah. 01:27:37 L G: Yep. 01:27:38 L G: I can go. 01:27:39 L G: It's also related to AI in a different way. 01:27:42 L G: I've been involved recently in some protests and organizing around kind of AI data centers in Vancouver. 01:27:51 L G: And something I've noticed is that there's a lot of a lot of people coming to these protests, coming to these movements, get their information from social media, specifically from Instagram. 01:28:01 L G: And something we've noticed is that there's a huge amount of context collapse in the in what people get on Instagram. 01:28:08 L G: And in the case of AI data centers, what that means is that a lot of people, they get information about AI data centers, And that information tends to be specific information that is true but comes from, you know, a four year old project in Virginia or, like, Elon Musk's special Texas project. 01:28:27 L G: But because the way social media works strips information of almost all context, people then take that information as true about all data centers or they take it as true about the ones in Vancouver. 01:28:39 L G: And it becomes misinformation even though it was originally true. 01:28:43 L G: And this makes it difficult for for civil society and for activist groups to organize and get factual information out there and to have dialogue with companies and with governments because we have to first sit through what information is actually relevant to us, what information comes from somewhere else that doesn't apply here. 01:29:02 L G: And it creates a very difficult to navigate information environment that, yeah, has real implications for organizing. 01:29:11 L G: Yeah. 01:29:11 L G: Your your example of the fabricated citations. 01:29:15 L G: We have a a dubious honor here in the Greater Vancouver area that the very first lawyer to get in trouble for having fake AI generated citations in a court court submission was here in Vancouver, a family lawyer down at the, the Downtown Vancouver registry. 01:29:34 L G: But they weren't the first lawyer anywhere, and there have since been many other Canadian lawyers who fall into this trap as well. 01:29:41 L G: So it's does no amount of education or legally enforceable professional responsibilities seem to protect people from from these traps. 01:29:54 L G: The most recent piece of misinformation is not actually a Canadian example, but there was reporting today, some of you may have overheard me mentioning it. 01:30:02 L G: I found it really interesting that a a poll in the Los Angeles mayoral election, it turned out, was completely fabricated. 01:30:12 L G: And the polling outfit, which isn't really a polling outfit, that was behind releasing this fraudulent poll that said they had one candidate 12 points out ahead of their closest competitor. 01:30:29 L G: So they were doing it as a social experiment, almost a performance art piece to demonstrate how easy it is to inject fake information into the debate. 01:30:38 L G: And the candidate that they had out in front had actually initially signal boosted that that completely fake poll on their social media and that took it down once they were contacted, of course. 01:30:52 L G: But it is it is interesting how you know, whether or not that entity is telling the truth. 01:31:00 L G: I don't know. 01:31:01 L G: I don't have any background other than the independent article I read today. 01:31:05 L G: But, it shows how muddled things can get even and if what they say is true, then there's no no malice anywhere in the building. 01:31:14 L G: But it's still misinformation. 01:31:16 L G: It still undermines everybody's trust in, in the information that we're consuming as prospective electors. 01:31:26 L G: It's happening everywhere. 01:31:30 L G: So so maybe you have your thoughts about this, and it's something I've been mulling over based on conversations with others and messages that we receive also at open media. 01:31:45 L G: So it's the the use of terms such as disinformation and misinformation and malinformation seems to distract from for in within some circumstance for some people. 01:32:01 L G: It seems to distract from the conversation about the harm of some information and data that is spread mostly through social media, perhaps because of the political assumptions that get attached to the words or or the people using the terms. 01:32:18 L G: But truth is, in my opinion, that misleading and incorrect information has been created and will be or will be spread for a really, really long time. 01:32:30 L G: It's it's not a new conversation. 01:32:32 L G: It's not a new thing. 01:32:35 L G: And it's been given different names and different labels and different reactions as it happens. 01:32:40 L G: But there is that information, like I said, can potentially affect us and affect everybody regardless of the political parties and such and such. 01:32:53 L G: So I it's it's it's almost like it those that information and that that data insights, emotions way faster than it it in in than thoughts and analysis. 01:33:13 L G: And I think that that gets in the way of the conversations. 01:33:19 L G: And that that's one thing that I wanted to bring about with this series of of panels. 01:33:27 L G: Yeah. 01:33:27 L G: We might use the words, and some people may or may not choose to use them. 01:33:31 L G: But what we are focused on is the the impact and the harm that can cause the the mayhem and the the fields that can bring about and the sometimes negative actions that come with it. 01:33:45 L G: So I don't know if if you have experienced that and the opposition of, like, from people when when you use the terms, I think, in your pay in your book or in your papers or, like, you know, when you're talking to to others? 01:34:04 L G: I guess I only speak to this, but I don't have to. 01:34:08 L G: Okay. 01:34:08 L G: We'll we'll we'll go around. 01:34:10 L G: It's Yeah. 01:34:10 L G: So yes, we are in a very polarized culture where people are feeling very reactive. 01:34:18 L G: And, sometimes, I think people are reading that and figuring out ways to mobilize and lean into that situation, and it can be very destructive. 01:34:32 L G: This is where I'm thinking of when I hear what you're saying. 01:34:37 L G: There's two examples of this that I think are very interesting that have to do with the political climate in Canada. 01:34:43 L G: One of them is, a situation that's unfolding in Powell River in BC. 01:34:49 L G: There has been a discussion about changing the name of Powell River. 01:34:52 L G: So if you're familiar with, Madera Park, its name has been changed to Salaluz. 01:34:57 L G: There are other communities in BC that have had their names changed, and that discussion is unfolding in the Nile River, not least because Powell had a particular historical impact in BC. 01:35:10 L G: However, there's this really excellent analysis done by a fellow who goes by BC History Boy, and he has a substack feed. 01:35:20 L G: And he's a carpenter in Powell River who does amazing research and amazing analysis. 01:35:26 L G: So you can look it up. 01:35:27 L G: He's available online. 01:35:29 L G: He did an analysis because when they started to have civic discussions in Powell River about changing the name, the community was surprised because people showed up to these discussions in droves, and they were already angry when they arrived. 01:35:46 L G: And the conversation was super polarized. 01:35:48 L G: When they looked into it, they discovered that trolls had been circulating content into Powell River for quite some time and had been inflamed the discussion. 01:35:58 L G: And it turned out that these folks were linked to certain political interests in in Canada and that those political interests were further linked to the current Mexican states. 01:36:09 L G: So we see this strategic use of social media to explore how narratives can trigger, what language to trigger. 01:36:17 L G: It's like we know that people are very, like, edgy and that we're reactive, And so then they try to figure out what language to use to actually cause that reaction. 01:36:29 L G: Another example is we've been doing some research at SFU on shoreline plastics, so we get a lot of trash washing up. 01:36:40 L G: And there has been a lot of work by different organizations in Canada trying to get people to rethink their use of plastics, and there have been laws passed to reduce plastic bags. 01:36:51 L G: I'm sure all of you are aware of this. 01:36:52 L G: It's very obvious in our daily lives. 01:36:55 L G: And one of them was the plastic lids on coffee cups. 01:36:59 L G: Right? 01:36:59 L G: So now we're seeing paper lids introduced or other solutions. 01:37:02 L G: There was this really fascinating meme by a conservative MP, federal MP, who tried to make the link between the paper lids on Tim Hortons coffee cups and woke culture. 01:37:17 L G: And yeah. 01:37:19 L G: But you can see this was done off election cycle. 01:37:22 L G: So you can see that they are testing language to see what will lead and what will circulate and what will get uptake on social media. 01:37:32 L G: Fascinating, and it it gets me thinking about sort of what you're raising. 01:37:37 L G: Yeah. 01:37:37 L G: Mike? 01:37:38 L G: Can I just ask a quick project your voice? 01:37:41 L G: Sorry. 01:37:41 L G: I have a small voice, so I'll try. 01:37:45 L G: We'll we'll amplify it. 01:37:47 L G: We'll amplify it. 01:37:49 L G: We'll we'll do the edit. 01:37:50 L G: Well, and Yes. 01:37:52 L G: Design choices that have been made by social media platforms create a situation where inflaming emotion is rewarded with greater visibility. 01:38:03 L G: Right? 01:38:04 L G: So in in many respects, and I started with design choices because, ultimately, these are these are options that people oftentimes, people, in California, but not exclusively, have made, have made these decisions about how, about what the conditions are under which we can talk to each other online. 01:38:27 L G: Right? 01:38:27 L G: And those decisions, have an impact on not only what we see, but how people choose to communicate, especially when there are monetary incentives as there often are for for larger engagement numbers. 01:38:43 L G: So that's, to me, where the digital policy hook is in there. 01:38:48 L G: That we we see the effects and we experience the effects. 01:38:53 L G: We experience, you know, the cortisol spikes when we go on and we get trapped in the endless doom scroll. 01:38:59 L G: But those are all downstream of decisions that have been made for reasons that seem logical to the people who made them. 01:39:08 L G: And when we talk about digital policy, we talk about what we can do in terms of our democratically governed institutions because business is not democratically governed in order to change those incentives to try and create a world that we're happier to live in. 01:39:26 L G: Yeah. 01:39:26 L G: That that aspect of some of the design that we need to be inflammatory aspects of kind of misinformation or any kind of information is really important, I think. 01:39:37 L G: Because one of the things you see with misinformation generally is that often the goal is less than not the goal, but the effect is less to make people change their mind, and it's more to harden people in their positions. 01:39:49 L G: And it creates like, it heightens people's emotions. 01:39:51 L G: Like you said, the cortisol spikes. 01:39:52 L G: It heightens people's investment in a particular position that they're in. 01:39:56 L G: And if they disagree with the misinformation, then it becomes an object of mockery, which again heightens your attachment to your own position. 01:40:02 L G: And what it does is it helps divide people. 01:40:05 L G: And one phrasing effort for this is it turns the marketplace of ideas into a battlefield of ideas and makes it much more difficult for people to sit down and kind of self regulate and think about what's happening and communicate and deliberate. 01:40:19 L G: And that impact of misinformation is is hugely magnified by exactly the design choice you're talking about where it's like a lot of the these systems go on attention. 01:40:29 L G: Like, it's like, oh, what will get more attention? 01:40:30 L G: What will get more views? 01:40:32 L G: What will get more interaction? 01:40:34 L G: And that tends to be emotionally heightened stuff rather than thoughtful, slow connection process. 01:40:40 L G: And I think a great example that's really relevant to BC right now is the way that the Cowichan tribe's decision has been discussed and kinda digested. 01:40:51 L G: This is and it's very frustrating for me as someone who has a background in indigenous law because there is a a a lot of history that is not inaccessible to most Canadians, but you have to go out of your way and look at it. 01:41:07 L G: We get a very cursory level or certainly, when I was going through school in the nineties and early aughties, we got a very cursory level of education about the history of colonization and what that looked like, in these territories. 01:41:22 L G: And, what I discovered going through law school is that there was this, in terms of how the law that governs us all got here, the story that even within the European descended legal tradition. 01:41:40 L G: It starts on a foundation of essentially denying that indigenous societies were real societies that had law that needed to be respected. 01:41:49 L G: Because in the imperial law of the British empire, if there was already law in a territory, then that law became incorporated. 01:41:57 L G: It didn't become completely displaced. 01:42:00 L G: Right? 01:42:00 L G: So the people who came here, out of racism, apply the legal framework that the courts now have rejected. 01:42:10 L G: Right? 01:42:11 L G: The Canadian courts have rejected the racism that was the foundation. 01:42:17 L G: Now we have a hollow foundation. 01:42:20 L G: So the challenge and is to within our constitutional framework, which has, as of 1982, constitutionalized Aboriginal rights, which means that the courts have to be able to interpret it because the whole the core function of the courts as well as dispute resolution for private parties, which is what most of us think of. 01:42:41 L G: But they are the branch of government that is there to interpret the constitution and make sure that it is being applied. 01:42:49 L G: So once Aboriginal rights become constitutionalized, courts have to deal with it. 01:42:55 L G: And there's only so long you can kick the can down the road until you start to have to deal with it and reconcile and it becomes very complicated. 01:43:03 L G: The idea that that indigenous nations and Aboriginal title are trying to take things from ordinary Canadians is a framing that to my mind is very, very inaccurate having done that, but it takes a long time to explain why it isn't. 01:43:24 L G: So it's very susceptible to that kind of, you know, the the lie gets around the world three times, or perhaps we should say it gets around the province three times before the truth has a chance to get its shoes on. 01:43:37 L G: And in this case, it's not just the shoes. 01:43:40 L G: We have to put on a whole snow suit because it's so complicated and the history is nuanced and all the pieces matter. 01:43:47 L G: So keep that in mind when you when you see the the framing of of like, oh, no. 01:43:54 L G: They're coming for people's houses. 01:43:56 L G: Now people can't get mortgages. 01:43:57 L G: And it it started as soon as the court decision came down far before it was possible that banks had had a chance to really read it and and talk to people and go through, through application cycles. 01:44:09 L G: So, people leap to conclusions and sometimes they think that they're accurate. 01:44:14 L G: And sometimes I'm sure it's just what they believe is going to be the most politically beneficial for the ends that they want to achieve. 01:44:24 L G: But especially when an issue is complicated and has a a depth of history or a depth of of technical information that you need to really understand all the moving pieces, be very critical of simple and emotion inflaming, headlines. 01:44:44 L G: So I I I'm gonna go with you because you mentioned through email to me at concept that I've been explaining to you that I'm very interesting of a context collapse. 01:44:58 L G: Context collapse. 01:44:59 L G: And I I just wanna ask how if you could explain that concept within the research that you have done in in in in in the ABC communities. 01:45:10 L G: So context collapse. 01:45:13 L G: Essentially, information exists within context. 01:45:15 L G: So if you have information about how how law works, for example, or how government functions, that information is only true in a specific context. 01:45:25 L G: So if you say, for example, oh, in you know, this is how a mortgage works and this is how property title works. 01:45:32 L G: That's true within a certain legal framework, but it's not necessarily true in a different jurisdiction, not in a different legal regime. 01:45:40 L G: Context collapse is what happens when you have a piece of information that fits into a larger textual framework that is taken out of that context, put somewhere else where it no longer has the context that makes it true and then becomes false. 01:45:56 L G: And this can so, for example, one of the ways that this that one of the things that can happen here, especially in English speaking Canada, is that we get a lot of information from The United States. 01:46:07 L G: And and there will be things about, oh, this is how the health care system works. 01:46:11 L G: And then people in Canada will start to think that information they get about the health care system is might be true, and that information might be true in New Jersey or California. 01:46:21 L G: But because they're only seeing a census or two of information about, you know, oh, you know, just this is how hospitals work, or this is how your insurance coverage works. 01:46:30 L G: They don't know that that information comes from a state in The United States, and then they see that and they either because if they don't know how things work in their own province, then they will interpret it that way, or they will just get confused and start to think that there's mixed messaging about how the world works. 01:46:45 L G: And because that context is gone, that can make it very difficult for people to navigate information. 01:46:50 L G: We see this in, particularly in in Canada. 01:46:52 L G: There's a lot of difficulty around our electoral system and around how our democracy functions because it is not the same system as we find in The United States. 01:47:00 L G: But a lot of English language information about democracy that Canadians consume comes from The United States. 01:47:07 L G: So people in Canada often understand how American elections work more than they understand how Canadian elections work. 01:47:13 L G: And that is partly a result of context collapse. 01:47:15 L G: They get tons of information, but that information is still close from where it comes from and where it's true. 01:47:20 L G: K. 01:47:21 L G: That's a great example of that. 01:47:23 L G: Yep. 01:47:23 L G: Sure. 01:47:23 L G: Talking about before. 01:47:26 L G: The federal government is looking to introduce a new big data center into Mount Pleasant in Vancouver, and people are talking about the potential impacts of this. 01:47:38 L G: And one of the things they're talking about is how data centers have a huge environmental impact because they use a lot of water. 01:47:46 L G: But a couple of weeks ago, there was an excellent article in the New York Times along like, an essay about data centers and community responses to them in The US. 01:47:55 L G: And one of the points that was made in that article was that, actually, the technology for cooling data centers has caught up with the times and that they are no longer using a lot of water. 01:48:06 L G: They might still have environmental impacts, but that piece comes from past experiences in Chile and Ireland with data centers where they were using in The United States where they were losing a lot of water. 01:48:18 L G: It's possibly not the case that the data center in Vancouver will be losing a lot of water, which is not to say that it's still okay, but that's an example of context for that. 01:48:27 L G: Yep. 01:48:28 L G: That is a very specific thing that we've dealt with. 01:48:30 L G: Like, I've been in the organizing groups when we talk about those data centers that, yes, that we have a ton of people who come in and they're very terrified of the water use. 01:48:37 L G: And the more research we do, the more we realize, oh, no. 01:48:40 L G: There's a a huge problem with the electrical consumption, but the power the water consumption is just not the issue that it it seems to be. 01:48:46 L G: So, yeah, it's very different. 01:48:47 L G: The technology has changed. 01:48:48 L G: And so, arguably, like, it uses potentially more electricity than it used to have other conflicts. 01:48:54 L G: But the water use is really kind of, yes, that's out of data, out of geographical context. 01:49:02 L G: I I have a question for for the lawyer in the house. 01:49:08 L G: Okay. 01:49:09 L G: And I'm a lawyer. 01:49:10 L G: I'm not anyone in this room's lawyer. 01:49:13 L G: Okay. 01:49:13 L G: Ask your question. 01:49:14 L G: Okay. 01:49:15 L G: Got it. 01:49:15 L G: Got it. 01:49:16 L G: As someone who defends both free expression and privacy rights, how do you balance the government's interest in combating harmful misinformation against against individuals' right to communicate to you? 01:49:31 L G: Oh, easy one. 01:49:34 L G: No. 01:49:34 L G: This is getting that balance right is one of the what I see as the the biggest challenges in in terms of digital policy, especially when we're thinking about online harms. 01:49:53 L G: Because freedom of expression doesn't just cut one way. 01:49:55 L G: When we talk about these online spaces, if there is, you know, hateful and behavior that that marginalizes and excludes certain voices, that's also a free expression issue. 01:50:15 L G: Right? 01:50:15 L G: We want people to have equitable access to these platforms to have so that we can have a real vibrant public discussion where multiple different viewpoints can be shared and debated. 01:50:31 L G: I think those platforms are not designed for that, though. 01:50:36 L G: Right? 01:50:37 L G: They are designed for, you know, early stages for sort of design for what the founders thought would be cool. 01:50:46 L G: Or, like, let's take you know, people have blogs, so let's do microblogging. 01:50:50 L G: That'll be fun. 01:50:52 L G: Or I wanna be able to see all my friends' class schedules, that kind of thing. 01:50:56 L G: A very rudimentary, like, mid two thousands of social media. 01:51:00 L G: Now it's become a lot more complicated. 01:51:03 L G: There are a lot more, commercial interest. 01:51:05 L G: There's a lot more money involved. 01:51:08 L G: So what the design for these platforms is mainly driven by those commercial factors. 01:51:13 L G: Right? 01:51:14 L G: It's they're not designed to be a public square, but they're the public square that we have now in the age that we live in. 01:51:24 L G: So, there are many cases where values that are important are intention. 01:51:30 L G: And we have to figure out a way to mediate between those values to have a structure that we can all live with it that allows us to thrive and get the right answer most of the time and avoid the answers that we cannot bear. 01:51:45 L G: So really well developed version of that would be like criminal justice system, right? 01:51:50 L G: Where, we've developed over centuries principles like the presumption of innocence. 01:51:56 L G: And what that really comes down to is that we would rather let people who do antisocial things go unpunished than punish innocent people. 01:52:07 L G: And to a certain extent, we can't know with certainty what happened. 01:52:12 L G: Right? 01:52:12 L G: We can there are all these bells and whistles, lots of evidence, lots of procedure, to try and get at the closest thing we can to certainty, especially in the context of a criminal trial, especially when it's a serious crime like murder. 01:52:28 L G: But you never have a 100% certainty because that's just not how facts work. 01:52:34 L G: Right? 01:52:35 L G: That becomes very difficult on on the Internet because taking time, all those processes, it's slow. 01:52:44 L G: Everything moves very, very quickly online. 01:52:47 L G: And there are very real harms, not just the harms of bigotry that can exclude some voices from the conversation, which leads to slanted public discussion, which leads to slanted public policy, but also more direct harms. 01:53:03 L G: So things like child sexual abuse material circulating that directly harms people who have been harmed to create that material. 01:53:10 L G: It harms survivors, and it harms people into the future by creating and normalizing that material and creating demand. 01:53:20 L G: Right? 01:53:23 L G: That that's something where we really need to look at the details. 01:53:31 L G: Right? 01:53:31 L G: We need to be very careful when we restrict speech and make sure that we have a very, very good reason that we can defend for doing it and not go any further than we have to. 01:53:43 L G: Another kind of complicating factor is that now we have synthetic accounts posting. 01:53:51 L G: Right? 01:53:51 L G: We have it used to be the case that you could be pretty confident that the Twitter user you were interacting with was a person. 01:53:58 L G: And that's not the case anymore. 01:54:01 L G: And that's not just confined to accounts on social media platforms, but there are also you know, since AI models scrape the Internet and are now being, built into search engines. 01:54:18 L G: So the first answer you get on Google is, like, an AI answer to your question, which is not what I wanted. 01:54:26 L G: But, there's a great incentive to poison the well for those models to try and slant those answers to what you think what you want them to be, essentially. 01:54:36 L G: And there have there has been some reporting that there are there's synthetic material, so AI generated material on the Internet that's not formatted for humans to read as well. 01:54:48 L G: Right? 01:54:48 L G: So we need to think about how easy it is when you have a text generation engine to do that. 01:54:59 L G: And that also contributes to to how valuable old text is to the training models, right, which is part of why we get the why we're starting to see the phenomenon of old books being destroyed at scale so they can be scanned and and used for training. 01:55:17 L G: So all these pieces kinda come together. 01:55:19 L G: It's very tangled. 01:55:20 L G: I don't have an answer. 01:55:22 L G: I wish I did have an answer off the top of my head, But I think the way that we get to this is through, being clear eyed about what the, the challenges are, what are, factual challenges, and what are just theoretical tensions that we sort of have to, have to talk out collectively and and decide what we're comfortable with. 01:55:49 L G: We're not going to get there by just letting industry do whatever they want, though, and letting commercial interest drive the show. 01:55:59 L G: Anyway, so that's my my very clear answer to your very simple question. 01:56:07 L G: That's why we have the conversations. 01:56:09 L G: Yeah. 01:56:10 L G: We'll we'll keep on tackling and thinking and adding to to that thread as it goes. 01:56:19 L G: It's it's part of it. 01:56:21 L G: It's part of what's happening and what we're working with. 01:56:24 L G: When it comes to the the individuals, I have a a question for you, Catherine. 01:56:31 L G: Different segments of the Canadian population, rural communities, new borners, youth, seniors, marginalized groups, and others are experiencing this information differently in in some cases. 01:56:45 L G: And I would ask then what what interventions would actually protect vulnerable populations without treating everyone else as naive or dismissing people's legitimate distrust of institutions. 01:57:03 L G: So I thought quite a bit about Krzyszka sent me this question ahead of time, and I've given it some thought. 01:57:09 L G: It's a tricky one also. 01:57:12 L G: But here's what I think, but I'm open to hearing other people's points of view on this. 01:57:19 L G: I think it's really important to cultivate spaces. 01:57:24 L G: People have been talking about the need for third spaces. 01:57:28 L G: To cultivate spaces where different groups of people can come together and create the groundwork for understanding information that they encounter. 01:57:43 L G: And for me, I believe in the value of a plurality of different systems of knowing and systems of processing information that correspond to different communities. 01:57:54 L G: And I guess that connects nicely with your discussion about your call acceptance. 01:58:01 L G: Sorry? 01:58:02 L G: The context. 01:58:02 L G: Context. 01:58:03 L G: Yeah. 01:58:04 L G: We need situated conversations that are contextually relevant that bring together groups of people who who who have common maybe histories or concerns or experiences. 01:58:19 L G: And we need the spaces, the time, the infrastructure to support those types of conversations. 01:58:27 L G: Why do we need this? 01:58:29 L G: In my work, I have, like, a theoretical concept, which is the idea of an un homed data subject. 01:58:36 L G: And what I mean by that is that in our very digitally mediated world, we are asked to constantly make sense of lots of different information platforms, databases, you know, information systems. 01:58:54 L G: We're constantly being asked to click here to fill in data, etcetera, and we're always doing this. 01:59:01 L G: And we become blunt into those systems, and we stop thinking about them. 01:59:06 L G: And we become kind of ungrounded. 01:59:09 L G: We don't think about what it means to think. 01:59:12 L G: We don't think about how our personal values would inform our choices. 01:59:17 L G: We just do. 01:59:19 L G: And I think we need those spaces where we can pause. 01:59:22 L G: There's a lot of pausing going on on this panel. 01:59:25 L G: We're all advising people pause. 01:59:28 L G: And we need those spaces where we can step back and say, what are my values? 01:59:32 L G: How do I want to approach the world? 01:59:35 L G: What does it mean to produce knowledge for me? 01:59:38 L G: What does it mean to engage with systems in certain ways? 01:59:42 L G: And and then be able to sort of take that knowledge with us out into the world and encounter the world with that. 01:59:52 L G: Otherwise, we're ungrounded. 01:59:54 L G: We don't have a foundation from which to act. 01:59:57 L G: So if we don't have those spaces to construct to have those conversations and to construct that grounding, we're sort of untethered and at the mercy of these systems that want to use our energy and want to use our clicks and whatever to circulate information and make money. 02:00:15 L G: So we need those spaces. 02:00:16 L G: That would be my answer. 02:00:17 L G: And I think we need a diversity of spaces. 02:00:21 L G: I think that's where it gets a bit scary for people sometimes to accept that different groups of people are going to have different ways of thinking and different ways of of producing knowledge and encountering and processing new knowledge. 02:00:34 L G: For me, I I don't find I think that's incredible, and I I really love the idea of diversities of ways of knowing. 02:00:43 L G: But we can talk about that if people want to. 02:00:45 L G: There there this is a place where there's definitely tension where different people have different kinds of view. 02:00:52 L G: I also think it's okay to have tension. 02:00:54 L G: Yes. 02:00:55 L G: Application device. 02:00:56 L G: Oh, application device. 02:00:58 L G: I'm gonna try. 02:01:00 L G: I'm gonna try. 02:01:00 L G: I'm gonna try. 02:01:02 L G: Okay. 02:01:10 L G: Okay. 02:01:12 L G: Okay. 02:01:13 L G: So this way? 02:01:16 L G: Do I do I have to point it at them? 02:01:18 L G: The the It's just It's right on the bell. 02:01:20 L G: It's really where I have to. 02:01:23 L G: Okay. 02:01:24 L G: So, bell, can I talk to it? 02:01:26 L G: Yeah. 02:01:26 L G: The volume and the volume box. 02:01:28 L G: Got it. 02:01:29 L G: Alright. 02:01:30 L G: Let's see. 02:01:31 L G: Can you hear me? 02:01:34 L G: Oh, it's like a little Yeah. 02:01:36 L G: Yeah. 02:01:36 L G: Can you hear me? 02:01:38 L G: Hello? 02:01:38 L G: Okay. 02:01:39 L G: Cool. 02:01:40 L G: Do you think I should use it? 02:01:41 L G: Because I I usually talk louder than I should. 02:01:45 L G: Wow. 02:01:46 L G: Especially oh, yeah. 02:01:47 L G: No. 02:01:48 L G: Put it aside. 02:01:48 L G: Okay. 02:01:49 L G: I should know that. 02:01:50 L G: Alright. 02:01:50 L G: So let's let's try this way. 02:01:52 L G: Yep. 02:01:53 L G: Okay. 02:01:54 L G: Yeah. 02:01:55 L G: I hear my paper. 02:01:56 L G: Wait. 02:01:58 L G: Okay. 02:01:58 L G: Sorry. 02:02:00 L G: What was I gonna ask? 02:02:01 L G: Yes. 02:02:03 L G: Gary. 02:02:04 L G: Mhmm. 02:02:04 L G: I wanted to ask you about not just your research, but I I know that from the debate that I've you you participate in a lot of demonstrations, and and you're in general in contact with the community. 02:02:21 L G: Yeah. 02:02:22 L G: I would like to know if what what have you seen in terms of digital literacy sharing within the community? 02:02:33 L G: Like, not not necessarily, obviously, not formalized people went to school and they study computer science or sociology or etcetera, but how how are people sharing the the tools and the openness to to figure out how to sort through all this information that may or may not be true Yeah. 02:03:00 L G: And could be helpful to us. 02:03:04 L G: I hope. 02:03:05 L G: Alright. 02:03:05 L G: Thank you for your Alright. 02:03:07 L G: That sounds alright. 02:03:07 L G: Yes. 02:03:08 L G: We have absolutely encountered a ton of variety and a ton of attention to make sure you're saying in terms of digital digital literacy. 02:03:18 L G: I think digital life is something that almost all of us have an experience with, a lot of experience with. 02:03:23 L G: And so a lot of people feel very strongly that they kind of are confident in how things work and how what their understanding of how the digital ecosystem functions. 02:03:32 L G: But there is a a very strong like, there's a lot of different in terms of what people's technical knowledge and understanding of these systems are, what people's sort of sociological understanding of these systems and these these contexts are. 02:03:49 L G: And so especially, for example, on the on the AI issues of one of the communities that I'm involved in are people who have a wide variety of different concerns about AI sometimes, conflicting concerns. 02:04:01 L G: And there is a lot of communication about digital literacy, about what do terms mean, about what tools do, what sorts of things under the hood. 02:04:10 L G: Like, there's a lot of debate about what the term AI even means. 02:04:13 L G: You know, we've had the term artificial intelligence for a very long time. 02:04:17 L G: There was, I believe, a paper published in 1976 where an author uses the term wishful mnemonic to describe the term AI. 02:04:26 L G: And essentially, his point was AI doesn't really mean anything. 02:04:29 L G: It doesn't describe anything. 02:04:30 L G: What it describes is how the technology makes us feel, not what the technology does. 02:04:35 L G: And this term has which resurfaced last year in a a paper by Malik Mitchell, I believe, and has become part of the discussion of what does AI even mean? 02:04:44 L G: What does this turn mean? 02:04:45 L G: What is it doing? 02:04:47 L G: When a company says AI, what does that mean? 02:04:49 L G: When the federal government says AI, what does that mean? 02:04:51 L G: When we as processors say AI, what does that mean? 02:04:54 L G: And picking apart that just that one piece of language is a long and sometimes arduous process because people often don't know, like, the the the details of how that technology works. 02:05:07 L G: And that complexity is replicated across every digital system we encounter. 02:05:11 L G: People don't necessarily know what the algorithm is on social media. 02:05:15 L G: People sometimes, for example, some people who are more active on less corporate social media, Some of you may have had the experience of trying to explain what is the fediverse to people and what is Maxanon. 02:05:27 L G: What are these other platforms that are completely different from social media that is run by corporations. 02:05:33 L G: And there's a lot of technical knowledge in those discussions that people have to catch up on. 02:05:36 L G: So there's a huge amount of sharing. 02:05:39 L G: And often that sharing is fairly well received. 02:05:42 L G: But because this is a very emotionally charged area, there's a lot of tension, there's a lot of skepticism. 02:05:48 L G: There are times where attempts to share digital literacy run up against concerns about someone being a shill or concerns about bad faith actors. 02:05:56 L G: And it is very it can be complex to navigate that tension and that skepticism. 02:06:02 L G: And that's something that yeah. 02:06:03 L G: I think the community is slowly getting better at, but it is a it is an ongoing effort, a communal effort that is taking place. 02:06:12 L G: Okay. 02:06:12 L G: And then we're gonna sorry. 02:06:15 L G: I didn't Can I just layer one thing in? 02:06:18 L G: Yeah. 02:06:18 L G: For sure. 02:06:19 L G: You get this right. 02:06:20 L G: Just to put it to the On the topic of of what even is AI, my my view is that it's more mainly a marketing term these days. 02:06:33 L G: But I wanted to share this kind of promo from Andrew Clement, who's an Emeritus professor at the iSchool at University of Toronto. 02:06:42 L G: And he likes to say that AI should really stand for algorithmic intensification. 02:06:48 L G: It's just I really like that. 02:06:52 L G: I try to avoid using AI because I I do think it is just a marketing term. 02:06:56 L G: And and the less that we capitulate to the frame, the marketing frames that we're sort of given from industry and from vendors of these of these technological tools, the better we're able to actually come to our own opinions. 02:07:12 L G: So Inducing it to math. 02:07:15 L G: Well, it it is all math. 02:07:16 L G: I do. 02:07:16 L G: No. 02:07:16 L G: I understand that, but that's not interest. 02:07:18 L G: Yeah. 02:07:19 L G: And and chat bots, like, we we spend an enormous amount of computing power on what's essentially a user interface issue. 02:07:29 L G: Okay. 02:07:30 L G: So here. 02:07:32 L G: Can I I'm just gonna pass the mic to Catherine, but we need two names? 02:07:38 L G: We dance well. 02:07:40 L G: It's it's about the team. 02:07:42 L G: So we talked about, like, at large in the community. 02:07:47 L G: But in this case, you work in a academic setting. 02:07:53 L G: So I wanted to ask pretty much the same question. 02:07:58 L G: Just thinking of of parents, thinking of young people, thinking of teachers that are actually thinking about this and and and dealing with it in the classroom and such. 02:08:11 L G: How do you see digital literacy as as as not as is right now, but perhaps as it should be it it could be improved to share this knowledge in different levels of. 02:08:31 L G: Okay. 02:08:31 L G: I wow. 02:08:32 L G: That works really well. 02:08:33 L G: Okay. 02:08:34 L G: I have two answers to this question. 02:08:37 L G: So the first is that I have a very particular way of thinking about digital literacy. 02:08:43 L G: In the world of media education, there's sort of three camps, we could say. 02:08:49 L G: One of them is functional literacy, and this is just knowing how to do. 02:08:53 L G: Right? 02:08:54 L G: So functional literacy around is is is knowing how to use a check, how how to use your debit card, how to open a bank account, how to maintain your personal finances. 02:09:05 L G: This kind of how to. 02:09:07 L G: Critical literacies are literacies that tend to focus on individuals and really empower them to make their own choices, to be critically aware of what's going on in the world and to assess and evaluate, apply your own values, and then make a decision about how and and whether you want to, say, use a technology. 02:09:33 L G: I really like critical literacies, but I also worry that they stop with the individual. 02:09:39 L G: So they sort of say, there's the technology. 02:09:41 L G: It's organizing our world. 02:09:43 L G: You decide whether and how you're going to use that technology. 02:09:46 L G: And the problem with that is that we often don't have a choice. 02:09:50 L G: We can be very critically aware of what's going on, but we have to be part of the banking system. 02:09:56 L G: We have to, I don't know, click yes to the consent mechanism when we log on to a website to be able to use that website. 02:10:04 L G: So for me, I'm really interested in the idea of communing media literacies. 02:10:09 L G: And by that, what I mean is that we think about how a new technology, a new information system, etcetera, is reorganizing our social relations. 02:10:20 L G: So we look at how the imposition of AI is changing the way we relate to each other. 02:10:27 L G: I think with social media, this is really familiar to us and all of the discussion about what's happening with, you know, social media bans for children, how social media actually social media it's not just cortisol. 02:10:41 L G: Cortisol is your stress hormone, but it's dopamine. 02:10:45 L G: Dopamine is your is your one armed bandit hormone. 02:10:50 L G: It's the hit you get when you when you gamble. 02:10:53 L G: And most social media is designed around giving you dopamine hits, and that's why you're like, next video, next video, next video. 02:11:00 L G: You're and for small children, their brains literally get wired around this, and so we are generating a generation of small humans who are susceptible to that form of addiction. 02:11:11 L G: This is why governments are starting to say, hey. 02:11:14 L G: Maybe we should ban social media. 02:11:16 L G: So we know that technology and and that has, along with many other factors like the pandemic, has contributed to a generation of younger people who have trouble socializing. 02:11:28 L G: They have trouble making eye contact with people. 02:11:31 L G: They struggle with social situations. 02:11:34 L G: So that is an impact that technology has had on how we relate to each other in community. 02:11:40 L G: And I see community literacy as helping groups of people understand how their experience of technology is shaping the way they relate to each other. 02:11:50 L G: So for me, when I do digital literacy work, I'm really looking to create situations that bring people together and help them deconstruct how their relationships are getting organized through these systems. 02:12:06 L G: Another example I like to give is that we are parts of many groups of people. 02:12:13 L G: So I'm I don't know. 02:12:14 L G: I'm a member of Aeroplan. 02:12:17 L G: Right? 02:12:18 L G: Well, Aeroplan's a big club. 02:12:20 L G: I don't know any of the other members of AeroPlan. 02:12:23 L G: So we are part of a group, but we have absolutely no group power. 02:12:28 L G: Or think of LinkedIn. 02:12:30 L G: LinkedIn has become an absolutely essential tool to organize us in the world for getting jobs and, you know, applying for jobs, getting work skills. 02:12:43 L G: Everybody who is a member of LinkedIn is giving data to LinkedIn that it then sells back to employers. 02:12:50 L G: Employers use that data to study the marketplace to understand how to structure jobs and what kinds of salaries to offer. 02:12:58 L G: So the benefit to you as a worker is that you get to know what jobs are available, etcetera. 02:13:02 L G: But the benefit to LinkedIn and to employers is that they get to structure the marketplace. 02:13:08 L G: So it's asymmetrical. 02:13:10 L G: Everybody's getting value, but the value is different and it's asymmetrical. 02:13:15 L G: So how do you bring people together in a setting where they communally can understand how these systems are organizing those social relations and what it means for how they relate to each other? 02:13:27 L G: This is what really matters to me. 02:13:29 L G: So the other answer I wanted to give about this is I have to look in my notes is that I have sort of four things that I need people to know about AI, some of which, that we've sort of heard already. 02:13:42 L G: One of them is that AI is many, many things. 02:13:48 L G: It's it can do different things. 02:13:51 L G: Right? 02:13:51 L G: It can generate, predict, recognize, recommend, be autonomous. 02:13:55 L G: It learns in a whole bunch of different ways. 02:13:58 L G: It uses different logic models. 02:14:00 L G: So if you wanna understand how an AI system arrived at the conclusion it arrived at, you'd have to first understand the logic model it was using. 02:14:09 L G: It also uses different types of mathematical models. 02:14:12 L G: And so and it's applied in all these different ways. 02:14:15 L G: So for example, AI might be used as a predictive model for your credit score. 02:14:21 L G: Right? 02:14:23 L G: But it also might be used as a large language model for conversation. 02:14:27 L G: So it's it's many different things. 02:14:29 L G: So that's number one. 02:14:30 L G: Just just knowing that is a huge game, I think, in digital literacy. 02:14:34 L G: We shouldn't talk about AI. 02:14:36 L G: We should talk about identic AI. 02:14:38 L G: We should talk about large language models. 02:14:40 L G: We should talk about predictive systems. 02:14:41 L G: We should be talking about the specific things in their specific applications. 02:14:47 L G: Second of all, I know this is gonna I I I'm talking to the people maybe of my generation. 02:14:52 L G: But when you talk to AI, you're not asking jeeves. 02:14:55 L G: K? 02:14:56 L G: It's not a search engine. 02:14:58 L G: And I think for people of my generation, that's very confusing because we still approach AI like it's a search engine, maybe. 02:15:08 L G: And so just knowing that is important. 02:15:11 L G: What it is is a tool that generates outputs according to a series of mathematical models. 02:15:18 L G: It's just stringing together words according to a statistic probability of how words get strung together. 02:15:27 L G: It doesn't know what it's saying. 02:15:29 L G: It's fabulating or it's it's a statistical sort of probability. 02:15:33 L G: That's it. 02:15:37 L G: Because of this, AI is reshaping our information systems in really critical ways, and the most important thing to know is that it has downgraded all responsibility onto you for verifying anything it says. 02:15:52 L G: And that's huge. 02:15:54 L G: That means that you really need to think of AI like your drunk friend who you're having a conversation with. 02:16:01 L G: I mean, I'm searching for metaphors to really help people grasp this, but you need to think of it as like your drunk friend. 02:16:08 L G: You can have a conversation with it. 02:16:10 L G: You may even learn the truth from them in that moment, but you need to humor them with a lot of questions. 02:16:17 L G: You need to proceed with a lot of skepticism, and then you need to follow-up and verify what they said. 02:16:24 L G: This this is what you're dealing with. 02:16:26 L G: And learning how to talk to that drunk friend is part of the art of using AI. 02:16:31 L G: And so we're, like, trying to figure out how to help people have conversations with this thing, which is kind of unreliable, but kind of interesting. 02:16:40 L G: I mean, I enjoy my drunk friends when I go out with them. 02:16:42 L G: They're interesting, but they're not reliable. 02:16:45 L G: So we have these are my four things. 02:16:48 L G: It's it's many different things. 02:16:51 L G: It's not a database. 02:16:52 L G: It's it's or it's not a search tool or a database. 02:16:55 L G: You're not getting something directly delivered to you. 02:16:58 L G: It's processing it. 02:17:00 L G: It's reshaping the information system in ways that downgrade a lot of work onto you to verify everything it says and that you need to now learn how to talk to that thing to try to get it to produce something useful and then you have to verify all that. 02:17:18 L G: Yeah. 02:17:18 L G: Can I jump in? 02:17:19 L G: Yeah. 02:17:20 L G: Sure. 02:17:20 L G: Cool. 02:17:21 L G: Cool. 02:17:22 L G: Thank you. 02:17:23 L G: So I love all of that. 02:17:24 L G: There's two things I wanna pull out of that. 02:17:26 L G: First is what you were just talking about about downgrading or, like, downloading essentially the responsibility onto individual users. 02:17:32 L G: A really important part of what makes AI produce content and text that is very different is that there's the way that these companies have set up their business models and the regulatory environment they exist in means that there is very little accountability for that information in a way that is not true, for example, if a public health authority puts out information. 02:17:54 L G: If an institution puts out human crafted information and that information is wrong, there are ways to make that institution accountable. 02:18:01 L G: If a person says something and that person is wrong, that person can be held accountable. 02:18:06 L G: They can adjust. 02:18:07 L G: They can improve. 02:18:08 L G: When an LLM produces content that is seem to be information, it's just ephemeral content that sort of appeared. 02:18:15 L G: The company isn't responsible to really create it in a meaningful way and will wash itself with all responsibility. 02:18:21 L G: So there is nobody to hold into account, which means there's we've lost a very important mechanism for ensuring improvement and reliability in these information systems. 02:18:31 L G: So that's something to keep in mind is that these AI systems kind of eliminate accountability and, like you said, force it onto the user because you are now responsible for making sure all of that is correct. 02:18:42 L G: You are responsible for making sure everything works right. 02:18:45 L G: To make it worse, because it was generated through these probabilistic systems, there's no provenance. 02:18:52 L G: Yeah. 02:18:52 L G: It's not like you can go back and say, well, how did they arrive at this conclusion? 02:18:56 L G: Yep. 02:18:57 L G: It's completely it decontextualized information. 02:19:00 L G: It just is sort of there, and nobody's responsible for it. 02:19:03 L G: Nobody will approve it. 02:19:04 L G: So that is a Kim, do you wanna I wanna say something. 02:19:07 L G: Yeah. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No. 02:19:07 L G: No it's not like we can't regulate this. 02:19:15 L G: So trading in Canada, traders are highly, highly regulated for their use of AI. 02:19:22 L G: And they must have a human in the loop. 02:19:25 L G: They must have a kill switch. 02:19:26 L G: If the AI goes bananas. 02:19:28 L G: They have to be able to stop it right away. 02:19:30 L G: They have audits. 02:19:31 L G: They have to have testing of their systems to demonstrate. 02:19:35 L G: They they are highly, highly accountable for how they use AI. 02:19:38 L G: So it's not like we couldn't have that type of policy. 02:19:41 L G: We're just choosing that. 02:19:43 L G: Yeah. 02:19:43 L G: I think we did. 02:19:47 L G: Yeah. 02:19:48 L G: Of course, there are it it's complicated when a lot of those decisions that are being made are being made in a regulatory environment that isn't democratically accountable to our population. 02:20:02 L G: Right? 02:20:03 L G: So a lot of this is happening in The United States where they have very different laws and norms than we do here. 02:20:10 L G: And we do see a pattern, and we've seen it over the past several years. 02:20:15 L G: For example, in policing technologies, where some a technology will be developed in The United States with their much more permissive in terms of what the what the industry can can collect and use in terms of people's personal information. 02:20:35 L G: They'll develop the tools like Clear Clearview AI, right, had a database of of images of people that they scraped from the Internet, which was legal in their home jurisdiction. 02:20:46 L G: I understand. 02:20:46 L G: I'm not a lawyer there. 02:20:48 L G: But then they brought this to Canada, and they started shopping it to, you know, to, like, shopping malls, to police. 02:20:56 L G: And the privacy commissioners of several provinces as well as the federal privacy commissioner had to go in and say, well, you can't do that. 02:21:03 L G: That's illegal. 02:21:03 L G: You can't just scrape people's images off the Internet. 02:21:06 L G: You can't that's not a a collection that's legal for personal information. 02:21:10 L G: And your face is very much personal information. 02:21:13 L G: It's very sensitive personal information because it's a sort of personal information that you cannot change without expensive surgery. 02:21:22 L G: So, actually, just earlier this year, the BC Court of Appeal, told ClearView, we've been fighting this this whole time, that, no, in fact, they are subject to BC's privacy laws. 02:21:37 L G: And their collections of BC residents images were illegal because they've been trying to argue that they should be able to just ignore BC's laws. 02:21:45 L G: Because they pulled out of the Canadian market, and they wanna not be regulated. 02:21:49 L G: But they still want the data that they scrape from the Internet that comes from Canadians. 02:21:54 L G: So it's a it is a puzzle in terms of digital policy, and it's not just a puzzle when we talk about information ecosystems, but but like the online news situation that you may be aware of is an as another one where these these organizations have such disproportionate power. 02:22:16 L G: They're multinational organizations. 02:22:18 L G: Their headquarters are usually not in Canada. 02:22:21 L G: But it can be a real challenge for how regulators actually get them to, follow our laws instead of just doing a market exit, so pulling their their services from our market, and then trying to make these arguments that we're not actively doing business in your jurisdiction, so we don't need to care about your law. 02:22:41 L G: So that that's another kind of puzzle to add to this. 02:22:45 L G: And I'm I'm sure we've all got lots of things we need to say, but I know that we are ten past the hour, and we did say we're gonna have a question period. 02:22:53 L G: Yes. 02:22:54 L G: So maybe I'm anticipating our moderators right here. 02:22:59 L G: I know I can talk. 02:23:00 L G: I wanted I wanted to ask Matt a we have questions online? 02:23:05 L G: We've got a few from the for the event that I I can't get to my audience. 02:23:10 L G: Okay. 02:23:10 L G: So we'll do a combination of maybe one present here and one that we got online. 02:23:17 L G: Any anybody have any questions? 02:23:20 L G: Yeah. 02:23:32 L G: Well, kind of something of observation then question. 02:23:36 L G: Yeah. 02:23:36 L G: Yeah. 02:23:36 L G: I guess, when you go into, like, common sections, oftentimes, you'll find that, not every time, but it'll be like you might find that very divisive posts are very, like, kind of whatever you wanna call it, certain point of view. 02:23:54 L G: And you'll find that there'll be a lot of, like, post supporting or people supporting it all. 02:24:02 L G: And then you'll find that maybe, like, a few people on the comment section will be just green, and then they'll be kind of possibly reacted to. 02:24:11 L G: That's my observations that kind of like it drowns it out. 02:24:14 L G: Mhmm. 02:24:15 L G: So even people, like, are trying to offer up maybe some debunking or whatever. 02:24:20 L G: Yeah. 02:24:20 L G: It's kinda drowned out. 02:24:22 L G: And then another thing was, basically, I was wondering so when you come across something that's very, like, disinformation or misinformation or whatever, and then that kind of situation happens to you, like, you try and point out what's false about it or whatever, and you're kind of drowned out. 02:24:47 L G: And you just you want to have maybe engage. 02:24:49 L G: Like, what is the situation to do in that do there, if that makes sense? 02:24:55 L G: Just like kinda like you're getting drowned out and it seems like the people are hostile or just you're making a light weight. 02:25:09 L G: Yeah. 02:25:09 L G: There's always a temptation to to sort of dismiss them as, oh, these must be bots. 02:25:15 L G: But Yes. 02:25:15 L G: It can't all be bots. 02:25:16 L G: Right? 02:25:17 L G: Yeah. 02:25:18 L G: I don't have insight. 02:25:19 L G: I'm just saying I'm getting close. 02:25:21 L G: Sure. 02:25:22 L G: Okay. 02:25:23 L G: Yeah. 02:25:25 L G: Well, this is a great opportunity to bring up one of the really important things I've learned over kind of my time in politics, which is that people's minds are very rarely changed by information. 02:25:35 L G: Like, you can't just throw facts at them and and change it no matter how well you present them. 02:25:39 L G: In fact, often when people are confronted with facts they dislike, they will dig in more and invest more in their previous position. 02:25:46 L G: People's minds are changed typically through relationships and through trust. 02:25:50 L G: And unfortunately, the way social media works, especially comment sections, is completely the opposite of what's actually needed to change people's minds. 02:25:59 L G: So unfair like, broadly speaking, it's very difficult to change people's minds over social media. 02:26:08 L G: The best way to change like, to engage with that sort of thing is often somebody you know in real life who trusts you, who has a reason to have a relationship with you and have conversations over a period of time. 02:26:19 L G: They learn to they come to understand that you're not coming from a place of malice, that you're a real person with real thoughts. 02:26:27 L G: That relationship of trust is the most powerful thing and that is just so hard to get on social media. 02:26:33 L G: It's I've come to feel it's almost a trap to engage on social media. 02:26:37 L G: It's when you have energy to spend on trying to make the world a better place, a comment section is is really just gonna sap you forever. 02:26:46 L G: Okay. 02:26:47 L G: A little depressing maybe, but on the plus side, relationships are very important. 02:26:50 L G: Trust is super powerful. 02:26:52 L G: So it's nice to meet you. 02:26:54 L G: Oh, a couple of thoughts because, you know, some people like to be on social media. 02:27:00 L G: So if you really do value spending time online, there are some workarounds to this. 02:27:05 L G: One of them is to gravitate to spaces that have, like, a communications convention. 02:27:15 L G: My husband is part of the Voyagers soccer band club on Facebook, and he was telling me that they have a really well thought out statement about how communications will unfold in that space. 02:27:29 L G: And so and when people don't adhere, there's strong moderation and the moderators, you know, send the folks on their way. 02:27:37 L G: And so, you know, you can find communities online that in which there's respectful discourse, and I think you can seek those out. 02:27:45 L G: Another thing to do is to look for forums that are where there's verified membership. 02:27:56 L G: So in Vancouver, there's something called PlaceSpeak PlaceSpeak, and it's a platform that provides the service of verified dialogue for political sort of civic dialogue. 02:28:10 L G: So municipalities will contract it when they need to have a discussion with the members of a specific community, and they don't want to include people who aren't part of that community. 02:28:21 L G: Right? 02:28:22 L G: So they don't want outsiders coming in and and swaying the conversation. 02:28:25 L G: And in order to participate, you have to say what is your address, what is your phone number, what do you have to put in your license, and things like this. 02:28:32 L G: You have verified real people that are members of your community who you might run into in your neighborhood. 02:28:39 L G: So there are, I think, ways to do that. 02:28:44 L G: I wanted to sort of I said I had no insight, but then there were very insightful comments. 02:28:47 L G: I'm gonna show something, please. 02:28:49 L G: This is one of the things I wanted to mention about about online spaces and also just about surveillance generally is that those difficult discussions that whoop, sorry, that we've all been talking about about and also the the ability to step back and to check-in with your human values. 02:29:11 L G: All of those are things that we that it's hard to do when you know you're being surveilled. 02:29:17 L G: Right? 02:29:18 L G: Because when you're being watched, you are, at least on some level, performing. 02:29:22 L G: And when you're performing, that takes some of your attention, but you're also filtering everything that you're doing and that you're saying through what you think other people, what you think your audience is going to make of it. 02:29:35 L G: Right? 02:29:36 L G: And that's why privacy is so fundamentally important in my in my view to democracy and to a functioning democracy. 02:29:45 L G: Because we need to be able to understand who we are and connect with ourselves as humans and connect with each other as humans, on that fundamental level, not as a performer, but as a as a fellow. 02:30:01 L G: In order to have these complex conversations, in order to engage meaningfully with Nuance instead of digging into positions. 02:30:11 L G: And that's something that these platforms that we that are the tools we currently have, they've been designed to facilitate corporate surveillance for commercial interest. 02:30:23 L G: Right? 02:30:23 L G: Like, if you're not paying for a service, then your data is the payment. 02:30:28 L G: Right? 02:30:30 L G: And that is very, very that means that they're very, very bad places to try and have these conversations about deep values and about how we reconcile tensions between values that maybe we can all agree on, but come into conflict when we bring them into the real world. 02:30:49 L G: Wanted to mention that. 02:30:52 L G: You said sorry. 02:30:56 L G: I I was told to go with a question online, but then we can we can get back. 02:31:01 L G: Okay. 02:32:13 L G: I I can mention one from a last previous discussion panel that we had. 02:32:24 L G: A health education and sex education that that seems to be a a big a big area. 02:32:34 L G: And and during the conversation, the we've kind of, like, touched the part that people focus or or or some people focus too much in the sex part of the education label, where sexual education is not teaching people to have sex. 02:32:57 L G: I mean, part of it. 02:32:58 L G: But it's it's more about your your health and your your reproductive organs and every many parts of your body and all parts of your body because it's a holistic entity. 02:33:11 L G: No? 02:33:11 L G: So that is one big and especially in high school, middle school and high school where you that kind of information is something that either you're learning from somebody that's learning it at the same time. 02:33:24 L G: But that GPT won't necessarily and memes and, you know, Substack and other places, Reddit, are not going to give you information that would keep your health in mind because that's that's the important part. 02:33:43 L G: It's it's effect that can have in your health, and you could potentially die due to wrong information and the use of from meds and things like that. 02:33:51 L G: So Sorry? 02:33:55 L G: I I think the louder it is, the more careful we have to be. 02:33:59 L G: Here we go. 02:34:00 L G: I will say as as the teacher as an instructor, what I'm seeing is I have so much I could say about this week. 02:34:10 L G: Get connected. 02:34:10 L G: Connect. 02:34:13 L G: But one of the things that I get concerned about is that it's so easy to produce stuff, and the students don't know what makes it good. 02:34:23 L G: And so what so for example, I had students do a project and they wanted to have illustrations and branding, whatever, and which is great. 02:34:31 L G: You know, I'm excited that they're excited, but then they produce a logo to represent Greater Vancouver that every mayor in Greater Vancouver would have chickens about. 02:34:42 L G: You know? 02:34:42 L G: Like, it was just, you know, every mayor would feel unrepresented in this logo. 02:34:47 L G: So I was like, you know, and with communications, we should be thinking critically about what it means to represent an idea. 02:34:54 L G: So they think it looks good. 02:34:56 L G: Right? 02:34:56 L G: It looks professional because Chachi could he produces something, quote, unquote, perfect, but they aren't thinking about, well, is it relevant? 02:35:04 L G: Is it appropriate? 02:35:06 L G: Is it so those kind of questions, is it relevant? 02:35:09 L G: Is it appropriate? 02:35:10 L G: Is it representative? 02:35:12 L G: Those things that if they're gonna be using these tools, they need to be thinking about. 02:35:16 L G: And and then learn to ask those questions. 02:35:18 L G: And then this is what I mean by downloading the responsibility. 02:35:21 L G: Sure. 02:35:21 L G: It can produce anything, but then you have to take responsibility. 02:35:24 L G: So, unfortunately, they took the responsibility in that form of a grade. 02:35:29 L G: You know? 02:35:30 L G: And that's where we are. 02:35:32 L G: Yeah. 02:35:35 L G: I would also love to jump in on this to circle back actually something happened earlier about the way that AI and social media change and structure our social relationships. 02:35:46 L G: Because when I think back to high school, my teenage years, and I think of what I wish I had done differently, the the biggest thing to me is learning to understand how to navigate social relationships and how to build healthy social relationships. 02:36:00 L G: And I had a conversation, so Father's Day was in June, And I was having a conversation with somebody who was in the kind of AI protest movement in Vancouver. 02:36:11 L G: And she was telling me, well, alright. 02:36:12 L G: Recently, I needed to fix, like, a leaky pipe in my apartment. 02:36:16 L G: And I was about to ask Chad GPT, like, I thought about it. 02:36:19 L G: My friend told me I should do that. 02:36:20 L G: And then I realized, wait. 02:36:21 L G: Why would I do that when I could call my dad and I can talk to my dad? 02:36:25 L G: And the thing is not just that her dad was like a plumber. 02:36:27 L G: He's not a plumber. 02:36:28 L G: But that was a way for her to cultivate a relationship with her father because he could feel like he could help her out. 02:36:34 L G: She could they could build mutual trust. 02:36:35 L G: They could spend time together. 02:36:37 L G: And that social interaction, like, he might have given her bad advice. 02:36:41 L G: Who knows? 02:36:42 L G: But they had a good, like, father daughter bonding time and build a relationship. 02:36:47 L G: And what AI and social media often do, unfortunately, is they divide us from other real people even on a really basic level of if chat g p t is summarizing something that another human has written, you're no longer seeing what that human wrote. 02:37:02 L G: You're seeing kind of a garbled reproduction of it. 02:37:05 L G: And so they they isolate us in a way from other people, whether that's our personal relationships or cultural relationships to other people in our speech communities or other things. 02:37:14 L G: So I would say one of the things to really highlight for young people is be mindful of the opportunities you're losing to connect with other people, whether that's your family, your friends, your ancestors, other people in your culture. 02:37:28 L G: And all of that kinda goes away when it's mediated through these technologies. 02:37:32 L G: So I would feel remiss if I didn't mention this. 02:37:39 L G: Because this is an area where where the context collapse that we discussed is really, really common in Canada. 02:37:47 L G: But in knowing your rights when dealing with the police. 02:37:50 L G: Right? 02:37:51 L G: So here's an example of how what we get from US media really doesn't match the Canadian experience. 02:37:58 L G: We have a right to silence. 02:38:00 L G: That's true on both sides of the border. 02:38:02 L G: But what that looks like and what you need to do to actually make use of it is very different. 02:38:07 L G: In The States and in American media, you just say lawyer, they have to stop. 02:38:10 L G: Right? 02:38:11 L G: That's not the case in Canada. 02:38:13 L G: In Canada, your right to silence is an endurance test. 02:38:16 L G: They can keep asking you questions potentially for hours, and you have to maintain your silence. 02:38:23 L G: That's a challenge for you to do. 02:38:24 L G: Right? 02:38:25 L G: You have the right to do it, but they're not going to make it easy for you. 02:38:30 L G: And not knowing that if you're going into a custodial situation can make you feel like you don't know anything, right, when that turns out to be false. 02:38:39 L G: So BCCLA, we have on our website the recently updated materials about BC specifically and Canada generally. 02:38:47 L G: We have resources that are targeted to students who are dealing with police and schools, and it's all available free. 02:38:56 L G: I would encourage you to take a look at it, but but that is something that it's not just kids, but especially kids. 02:39:03 L G: Certainly, some children are more likely to to be in those situations with police than others. 02:39:08 L G: But anyone who wants to exercise their free expression and assembly rights and go into, protest demonstrations and become involved should have a baseline understanding of what their rights are in dealing with the police and how they can protect themselves from criminal liability. 02:39:25 L G: And I apparently, I could just talk about all of this for hours, but I wanted to say one more thing that I think is generally interesting, but specifically, I think, addresses a part of the question about education. 02:39:39 L G: So one of the things with AI promoting itself and marketing itself is that okay. 02:39:45 L G: There there's an author named Karen Howe who has written a a book recently that is AI imperialism or Empire of AI. 02:39:52 L G: Emperor of AI. 02:39:53 L G: Thank you. 02:39:54 L G: And has this fantastic metaphor, which is the idea of a rocket ship versus a bicycle. 02:40:01 L G: So the rocket ship is Chat TPT, and the bicycle is small language models. 02:40:08 L G: You don't need a big data center and, like, tons of data, all of the world's amassed digital content, to run AI. 02:40:18 L G: You can run AI on a laptop using a small language model. 02:40:22 L G: And then how it's relevant to teaching is that right now in BC, we're discussing the introduction of Microsoft Copilot into the school system and thinking about, like, these are big corporate sort of promotions of large language models and and, you know, rocket ship AI into the school system. 02:40:40 L G: And what I think is really unfortunate about that is that what we're not doing is saying, let's teach high school students how to build small language models, which is really quite accessible and would be super cool. 02:40:52 L G: Or let's play with Raspberry Pis and show sticky there there are really cool models for using Raspberry Pis or microbits or these, like, little, you know, I don't I don't know, computers, to show them that they can generate their own data and train their own AI and run their own systems on these little things. 02:41:13 L G: So we could be teaching them the logics of AI in these ways. 02:41:18 L G: We could be showing them how to build small language models just on laptops, and they would be learning how to build useful tools using these logics and understanding the like, how how the probability systems work for these different etcetera. 02:41:33 L G: And instead, we're saying, oh, my you know, Microsoft Copilot is going to save education model. 02:41:40 L G: That's a pile of crap. 02:41:41 L G: It's a pile of crap. 02:41:42 L G: Yes. 02:41:43 L G: I thought it would save. 02:41:45 L G: It's just it's Define save. 02:41:49 L G: Exactly. 02:41:50 L G: Okay. 02:41:51 L G: So we have about two I would stretch it to three minutes. 02:41:56 L G: Are there any Is there any takers? 02:41:59 L G: Running up line? 02:42:02 L G: No. 02:42:02 L G: Oh, boy. 02:42:03 L G: That is correct. 02:42:04 L G: Yes. 02:42:04 L G: Alright. 02:42:05 L G: Okay. 02:42:05 L G: Okay. 02:42:08 L G: Thank you so much, Garrett, for your I've heard words like trust and relationship and communication and and it's I mean, I think that's the answer to the question I'm gonna ask, but but I I'd love if you could from each of you. 02:42:24 L G: When it comes to the online world, misinformation, disinformation, do you have any suggestion for concrete action that we can take? 02:42:37 L G: Sorry. 02:42:38 L G: This is so easy. 02:42:38 L G: It's like an invisible line. 02:42:46 L G: Answer is what Derek said, honestly, but in the online world. 02:42:50 L G: Yeah. 02:42:50 L G: So how do we create that? 02:42:51 L G: And, I mean, I I don't think there are really any shortcuts. 02:42:55 L G: And part of the problem is that these conveniences and shortcuts are are possibly being sold to us. 02:43:06 L G: And the really the goal is to capture the market, right, to make us dependent on these shortcuts. 02:43:12 L G: So try to do things the hard way sometimes, especially when we're talking about connecting with other people. 02:43:20 L G: Build build connections, build them slowly, Take an interest in your interlocutors' lives. 02:43:27 L G: And your networks will be smaller, but they'll be richer, and you'll be able to trust that there are humans with, you know, well developed ethical systems and a good head on their shoulders on the other side. 02:43:41 L G: Pause. 02:43:42 L G: Pause. 02:43:44 L G: Don't react. 02:43:45 L G: Try not to be reactive. 02:43:46 L G: Take a minute. 02:43:48 L G: In fact, I need a little mnemonic device for everybody here, which is remember the information's produced. 02:43:55 L G: That's the p and pause. 02:43:56 L G: Ask the five w's. 02:43:58 L G: Who, what, where, why, and when? 02:43:59 L G: Who produced this? 02:44:00 L G: Why did they produce it? 02:44:02 L G: When did they produce it? 02:44:04 L G: Unpack the reasoning. 02:44:05 L G: Is the logic sound? 02:44:06 L G: Really think about just, you know, does this read for me? 02:44:10 L G: Substantiate the claims. 02:44:11 L G: Go and look and see if this is true, actually. 02:44:14 L G: We still have Snopes for this, but I don't know what platforms there are nowadays. 02:44:19 L G: And examine the information in relation to your own values and just pause and take that time. 02:44:26 L G: I think that goes along with the same idea, pausing conversations with people and take a minute. 02:44:33 L G: Pause when you get information online. 02:44:36 L G: Take that time to really think about it. 02:44:38 L G: I think that'll go a long way if everybody starts to do that to kind of lowering the temperature. 02:44:46 L G: Yeah. 02:44:46 L G: And to, I guess, to build on what what Ashlyn said about doing things the hard way, it's so we talk a lot about or rather, companies talk about how AI is inevitable, and people are getting better at pushing back against that and saying, well, yeah. 02:45:02 L G: I know AI is not inevitable. 02:45:03 L G: But we have sort of accepted that Facebook is inevitable, Google is inevitable. 02:45:08 L G: We've accepted the inevitability and the omnipresence of these big corporate entities and platforms. 02:45:14 L G: But the reality is that none of them are inevitable or even necessary. 02:45:18 L G: There are alternatives. 02:45:19 L G: And so when it comes to what we can what an individual person can do, and it is sometimes it's hard and sometimes inconvenient, but if you can't, from your professional perspective, just leave those platforms. 02:45:31 L G: Like, just stop using Google. 02:45:33 L G: There are other search engines. 02:45:35 L G: Get off Facebook. 02:45:36 L G: Delete it. 02:45:36 L G: Delete Instagram. 02:45:37 L G: Delete TikTok. 02:45:38 L G: There are social media platforms that are run as nonprofit volunteer efforts. 02:45:43 L G: People have these computers running in their basements. 02:45:45 L G: They're running things like PixelFed. 02:45:47 L G: They're running Mastodon. 02:45:48 L G: There are Internet forums. 02:45:50 L G: There are all sorts of things that people do that are not corporate products. 02:45:54 L G: Put Libby on your phone. 02:45:55 L G: Yeah. 02:45:55 L G: Put Libby on your phone. 02:45:56 L G: There's you know, you don't need to use Microsoft Office. 02:45:58 L G: I hate Microsoft Office. 02:46:00 L G: You can use LibriPress. 02:46:01 L G: Yeah. 02:46:01 L G: There are other almost everything that has a giant equal corporate version that everybody thinks is the only way to do it. 02:46:08 L G: There are versions that are free built by volunteers, and they might not work quite as well. 02:46:13 L G: They might be a little different, but they work. 02:46:15 L G: They do the job. 02:46:16 L G: And actually, when you get to use them, you can feel a sense of empowerment because you own the tools in a way that you never would if it was Microsoft or, I don't know, something else. 02:46:25 L G: So step outside of the walled garden, go find other tools, other platforms, and the people there are lots of people already there, so you won't be alone. 02:46:36 L G: So alright. 02:46:38 L G: So we are pretty much pretty much on time for the closing of the panel. 02:46:45 L G: I I want to thank you for being part of this space to have a conversation with real humans. 02:46:54 L G: And I hope that the networking continues, that you go to openmedia.org,um,.org. 02:47:04 L G: And check out, you know, just definitely our campaigns, of course, support our work, and also keep keep an eye for other spaces and other chats and discussions that we will be having throughout the year and throughout the years. 02:47:23 L G: We we are working on on continuing that nurturing of of networking and community building. 02:47:31 L G: So I really appreciate you coming in person. 02:47:35 L G: And those of you online, thank you for being part of this. 02:47:38 L G: I'm sorry about the perhaps low and high volumes, but thank you also for being part of this. 02:47:45 L G: And, Matt, do you have anything that you would like to add to it? 02:47:50 L G: Which which branch? 02:47:53 L G: Yes. 02:47:54 L G: The, classroom misinformation edition multimedia exhibit is at the Surrey Libraries Clayton branch. 02:48:03 L G: So down Clayton, about twenty minutes or so, twenty five minutes from Surrey Center. 02:48:10 L G: And their community center is really awesome, so I highly recommend for you to go visit the center and the library and check out the exhibit. 02:48:20 L G: And we're going to have the exhibit in other places in in and around Vancouver. 02:48:25 L G: So stay tuned and subscribe to our newsletter at openmedia.org. 02:48:33 L G: There, you will be getting the updates also of when we're gonna be having these conversations and more events. 02:48:38 L G: So thank you, everybody, and have a good evening.