Guest lecture "Regulating Artificial Intelligence in Canada: Key Challenges and Policy Options" by Dr. Anna Artyushina. York University, May 2024. Topics: understanding different types of AI systems; economic potential of AI applications; privacy issues; human rights violations; existing legislation

1. Regulating Artificial Intelligence in Canada: Key Challenges and
Policy Options
Anna Artyushina, Ph.D.
School of Urban and Regional Planning
Toronto Metropolitan University

2. What is AI?
• OECD (2023): AI system is a machine-based system that can, for a given set of
human-defined explicit or implicit objectives, infer, from the input it receives, how
to generate outputs such as make predictions, content, recommendations, or
decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments

3. What is AI?
OECD AI Policy Observatory (Nov 2023)

4. What is AI Good for?
• Breast cancer research (April Khademi, Toronto Metropolitan University)
• AI fraud detection (RBC, TD)
• Machine learning in astrophysics (Center for Astrophysics
Harvard&Smithsonian): clean noise, analyzes terabytes of data
• AlphaFold 3 (Google DeepMind): visualizes and predicts (?) molecular
structures

5. Popular AI Myths
• AI systems are sentient
• AI systems are smarter than humans
• AI systems can replace human cognition or human compassion

6. On the AI Mechanics and Sentence
• Narayanan & Kapoor (2024) AI Snake Oil: What AI Can Do, What it Can’t, and
How to Spot the Difference. Princeton University Press
• David Gunkel (2023) Person, Thing, Robot. MIT Press
• Bender et.al. (2021) “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots. Can Language
Models be Too Big?” FAccT’ Proceedings
• Frank Pasquale (2020) New Laws of Robotics. Harvard University Press

7. The reputation business is exploding. Having eroded privacy for decades, shady, poorly regulated data
miners, brokers and resellers have now taken creepy classification to a whole new level. They have
created lists of victims of sexual assault, and lists of people with sexually transmitted diseases. Lists
of people who have Alzheimer’s, dementia and AIDS. Lists of the impotent and the depressed.
Typically sold at a few cents per name, the lists don’t have to be particularly reliable to attract eager
buyers — mostly marketers, but also, increasingly, financial institutions vetting customers to guard
against fraud, and employers screening potential hires. (Pasquale, 2014, p. 10)
Privacy is the least of our concerns

8. Privacy is the least of our concerns

9. AI as Machine Knowledge Capital

10. The AI Patent Curve
The US Patent and Trademark Office, 2022

11. AI as Machine Knowledge Capital

12. Key Benefits and Challenges for Canada
• Economic benefits
• Influx of imported AI technologies
• Labour market suffers as more jobs get automated
• An acute shortage of AI professionals to develop, research and regulate AI
• Privacy violations
• Fundamental rights violations
• Threats to democracy

13. Industry Concentration

14. My analysis of AIDA

15. Canada’s AI Regulations
• Directive on Automated Decision-Making (impact assessments; due process for
the citizens)
• Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (impact assessments; clear language; human in
the loop; external audits; mechanisms of redress)
• AI and Data Commissioner (compliance, audit, shut down)
• AI Safety Institute (guidelines for the safe deployment of AI; changing regulations)

16. Slow Governance in the Field of AI

17. Thank you!
aartyushina@torontomu.ca