Love in the Code: AI Ethics, Advocacy & Community — Vancouver AI Meetup #20

0:00Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to the Vancouver AI community meetup number 20. You are the Vancouver AI community. Thanks for coming out tonight. We got a lot of folks in town from other places. My parents are here from California. Our keynote speaker, Jos Duncan, is there from Philadelphia. Her and I work together at a Google AI lab for journalists. We're co-leading a lab that we're about 5 months into eight months through. I'm so happy you could be here with us tonight and share your word. She runs an organization called Love Now Media and Philly that's using AI in very progressive ways for social justice and education and community building. So all that tell more about that. We got Peter

0:42Bittner here, my my business partner from the upgrade.ai. So there's a thread that goes through all this. When I first moved back to Vancouver two years ago, I applied for a Google accelerator and I got in and I came up with a lot of the ideas and worked through a lot of the business plans that have resulted in the upgrade.ai and our and my these events that we're doing and stuff. And so Peter and I worked alongside each other for a while and then we merged our companies together. So now we're co-owners in the upgrade.ai. I applied for another Google lab when they started doing this AI stuff and they turned me down because they said, "You're the person that keeps

1:18coming up who we want to coach it." So, I got to coach it and Jos is the other co collab lead. It's so cool. We all get to be here together tonight. A lot of you guys know we've been running a hackathon with Rival, a data storytelling hackathon. We're in round three. We've given away 5Gs already.

1:33Hey, we're going to give away another $2,500 tonight plus a special bonus prize cuz it was Yo, the projects, they're nuts. They're nuts. The winner and the special project is there's something special about each of them. All of them. There's a It was very hard to choose and we'll talk more about that later. Then I'm going to talk a little about the BC AI nonprofit society that we built and that we're launching here tonight. This is a nonprofit dedicated to AI adoption and learning and all sorts of sectors in the creative industries and education and government and so it represents the container to hold all the cool things the sub events you guys been running the hackathons

2:10we've been doing all the interesting stuff. So I'll tell you a little bit more about that but first to welcome us here tonight we got a couple special guests Gabriel George who you might know is going to kick us off first and then Caroline Hilton from the Indigenomics Institute is going to say a few words as well. though. Yes, one. Yes, Wanda.

2:29Okay. Okay. Come on up. Come on up. One sec. Gabe, you'd come, too. But my mom, I got to introduce my mom real quick. And my dad and my dad, of course. Look, you guys come as a pair. So, I just figured if I said mom, that meant both. This is Debbie Krug. My mom, she was a lifetime educator. My dad, he's an agricultural economist with the state of California. Cool.

2:54Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. I was going to let you say something earlier, but if you keep it very short, you can say it, right? >> Okay. [Applause] >> We are just so happy to be here and so proud of you, Chris. For some re, we came yesterday and for some reason whenever we cross the border, we get very intimidated and we say the dumbest things and we rehearse. One time, Kelly even said, "We're coming for pleasure.

3:24and he and I'm like, "What in the world are you talking about?" But yesterday the border yesterday the border agent was very he was very stern and he asked why we were coming and we said we're coming to hear our son speak at a conference and he said where and we said at the space center and he said I've never heard of the space center and I said it's the McMillan space center and he said, "Haven't heard of it." And so he said, "You know what? I think you mean the planetarium." And I'm like, "That's it, the planetarium." And he said, "I came here as a fourth grader and I have never forgot it." He said, "This is the

4:13coolest place." So, we're so happy to be here and thank you very much. You, Chris, you're surrounded with wonderful people. We're blown away. I did ask one dumb question tonight. I said, "Is AI the same as chat GPT?" >> It's a lot of young questions. >> And I don't know the answer that the guy told me.

4:36[Applause]

4:46>> This is our oneyear anniversary in this building and we're just signed the deal for round two. So, we'll be back. Yeah. Gabriel is up next.

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6:16[Music] Um, I want to welcome all of you here to this village that's known as Sonok. My let me My greatg grandmother lived here in this village and they brought a barge in and they moved our families out of here. I hail from the Tusleatuth nation and in the language I was giving thanks to our Musquam ancestors who share this territory to our Squamish ancestors and to my own as well. And not only am I just registered under the crown under colonial laws, we have to register like in one part of our family, but I come branches of my family go into Musquim, go into Squamish, and to many other places. It's a colonial construct

7:11to use a surname to attach ourselves through one line that we see things more as a web. And that's the way that our qual our indigenous way of understanding things. That's the way that some of the elders that I've been blessed to work with, they see these the internet. They see computers. They see it as something our people saw coming and they said that one day our world would be connected by a web and through that we would be able to speak to each other. These were prophecies that were preached prior to colonization, prior to the first ships.

7:56These waters that were on Bard Inlet, the first ship didn't come in here until the early 1790s. So that's almost 300 years after Columbus. That's a long time before we saw the first European ship. And my family has suffered a lot in that short time. Our language was stripped away within two generations completely.

8:22And that's a story of many of our nations in the Pac all of the Pacific Northwest and in many corners of the globe under colonization and the residential schools. At one point in British Columbia, it was illegal for us to wear our regalia. I'm wearing a small part of regalia that I possess tonight. And to sing our songs, to speak our languages, if we were gathered in a group of this size, we would be arrested and thrown in jail under the pot latch laws in British Columbia.

8:58And so my family, we've suffered a lot, but through that suffering, we hung on to our ways of being. We call it our suan off. We qualan our old people's way of thinking, our snowat, our teachings. And we've hung on to that. And it's important in our culture and it's important as human beings regardless of where we come from to have connection. And healthy connection is important.

9:33And so I look at what my ancestors went through, what happened in my family. This is not just stories from a headline or from a history book. It's something that I experienced growing up. And despite all of that, the integrity and the love that they carried forward, the elders in my family and the elders from the other nations around here, I grew up close with them as well. They were the same way. And so when we do this work in AI, it's good to have integrity, to have values.

10:10What is the base that you're operating from? And in that remember that connection is important that our people see it as a web. And it's interesting that concept of the web because that also comes from some of our origin stories. The spider brought gifts down to some of our peoples, some of our first peoples in these diff in these lands.

10:34And so I want to sing a song tonight. This song is a older song in my family. It's an eagle song. And when my late father was a young boy, like four or five years old, he was really taken by the drums. And one time he went missing at a festival. They couldn't find him at a canoe festival. They found him over listening to some of our relatives in Lummy. That's in Washington State just across the line. They were dancing there. They were attending a canoe festival, but he was off where the drumming and singing was. So his grandmother, she was Amistat Pakus. She gifted she gave my dad a eagle song and she gifted him an eagle

11:21bonnet as well. It had feathers on it and she beaded him some eagle appliques as well. And my late father said that anytime we see an eagle, he would stop and he would say a prayer. He would give thanks. He would he told us that the eagle would bring our prayers to the shenan to the ancestors to the creator. And so this is one of our old songs. It's an eagle song.

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12:17hallelujah. [Music]

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12:39[Music] Hallelujah.

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13:09Hallelu. [Music]

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13:42[Music]

13:50sap casm again. That's the eagle song. Patrick, [Applause] Gabriel George, you bless us. Thank you. Up next is someone who has taught me a lot about a lot of things, including the importance of opening gatherings like this in ceremony and that way to bring our attentions together and bring our energy together. So Caroline, I wanted to invite you to come up next and say whatever you would like. Caroline starts every meeting at our organization by asking the question, "How are you showing up?" And it means so much to me.

14:33I bring it into all my meetings and stuff as well. So how are you showing up tonight, Caroline? >> Pretty excited. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Gabriel, for the beautiful opening and reminding us to ground in place and to ground in teachings. And I really want to ask this question. What are we responding to?

14:56When you know that, when you know why you're here, when you know what has been brought together, we have to know what we're responding to in this moment. And when we do that and we can be real with what that answer is, then we can relate to each other and we can bring the best out of humanity itself. And I think that this power moment is able to reflect that. I I heard this quote and it said something to the effect and it's a little it's a little up out there right now.

15:31But I heard this quote and we hear that Chinese version of that of the symbol of chaos. But the concept was that when we experience chaos to create and that's very much my focus is that creative place inside of us to make sense. And I was fighting with my chat PT the other night. My qu was full on and we took it right out to the edge of meaning. I thought about it. The edge of meaning.

16:01Oh, that's far out. But that is this moment because as much as meaning has been prescribed to us, in each one of our heritage and legacies of how we got here, there was a prescription of meaning applied onto our humanity, indigenous or not. And it's in that prescription of knowing what we're responding to and the freedom that we can create from. And that's why I have mad respect for my friend Chris. I'm so honored that you spent the time with Indigenomics.

16:34Where's Mama Krug? Did this Did this kid come out that cool? Look. Seriously, did he come He came out that smart? Amazing. big respect. Thank you for bringing everyone together in a beautiful, creative, powerful way.

17:01>> I can tell we're going to run long, so I'm going to sample little bits out of the keynote. I'm probably going to have to cancel again to let you know that Caroline Hilton is one of the board members of the newly found BCAI Ecosystem Industry Association, this nonprofit that's bringing us all together. Thank you for Caroline for trusting me. I'm excited to be in this canoe with you. So, here we go. All right. Up next, we got, as I said, Jos Duncan-Asé from Philadelphia who I work with through the Blue Engine collaborative program for the Google News Initiative. We're we're teaching a bunch of journalists about AI and we're helping them with their projects and

17:36stuff. But that's how we've gotten to know each other and made a strong connection. But Jos, I really respect as an activist, as a leader in her community, media personality. Come on up here, Jos. She flew here from Philadelphia to come to this and so we could meet. I'm so happy. Thank you, Jos. It really blessed me.

17:58>> Thank you so much for having me. Hello, everyone. Wow, this room looks so amazing. I'm actually gonna share something with you guys. >> One second. >> Okay. I'm actually going to share something with you guys that's a bit personal and I didn't expect to share it, but I feel like this is a space where I can give you what's real for me.

18:23I lost a loved one last week and I actually have to head out tonight for a funeral tomorrow. But I have learned to navigate grief and loss by celebrating life. Thank you. So it was important for me to be here because I get to live and I get to feel and I get to connect with all of you.

18:52Right? That's life. And so I want to ask all of you to take a journey with me. I want you to think about the last time you witnessed an act of love. Just think about it. Maybe just close your eyes for a moment if you feel comfortable. When was the last time you witnessed an act of love?

19:23Now, whatever that feeling is, just hold that feeling here with you for a moment. Now, I'm going to ask you to think about one more thing. When was the first time you witnessed an act of love? Maybe inhale and exhale because some of this is taking you back to that small little child.

19:46Just think about it the first time.

19:53Now, what is that feeling? Take that feeling and just hold it with you for a moment because I'm going to ask you to recall it at a point. Okay? So, in my work, I deal in love. Okay. Can we get the slideshow now? And thank you. So, we're going to talk about love and AI. If you didn't know, we were talking about AI tonight, but also love. In my work, I deal a lot with love. I tell love stories. I'm a media person. I'm usually talking about media. How many of you here are media professionals? Can I just see your hand if you work in media?

20:34Okay. And how many of you work in tech? Some kind of tech. Whoa. Okay. So, it feels like I'm finding my people, right? But you guys really aren't my people. Like, my people are really media people. So, I feel like I'm cheating on my first love. But that's okay. The thing about it is in my work, I do a lot of work for social justice, for equity, for abundance, and for joy. And a lot of that is through reporting on black, indigenous, and brown communities through this lens of love because especially where I'm from in Philadelphia, most of the stories about black brown people are usually about crime, harm, all of that. So my platform

21:14has been Love Now Media. But in 2022 when I was introduced to chat GPT and midjourney which I was able to create my nails and some collard greens with I fell in love with this what this could do and what the potential was. And so I dove two feet deep into the world of AI.

21:38And I thought I was doing this fantastic thing because I could fill this gap between the tech working class and the tactile working class. So the tech working class people like most of you who have access to the new tools that are developing who understand what's happening. But then there are also the people who are very hands-on in their jobs, the mechanics, the people who are not interacting with technology at all.

22:06I felt like I and all of my identities could be a representative to fill those gaps. So I was very excited about my work in AI. Can we go to the next slide? And my community was not Next slide. They felt betrayed. How could you get into this thing, this robotic thing, this awful thing? How could you use AI to create a social media calendar?

22:40How could you generate an image of a child with AI? It was as if I was doing something awful. And so what I realized early on is that in media, we can go back one slide. Chris, I think we have to get the clicker thing next time. I realized that I had to disclose how I was using AI because people started to distrust this lovely media I was creating. And so I decided to create an AI ethics policy.

23:15And with that policy, I was able to let people know what I was doing with AI, why I was doing it, and how it supported our mission. So I think this act of transparency really helped people to feel safe. No, I am not using AI to do reporting. But I am using it to create those social media calendars. I am using it to help to write some proposals and to do things like that.

23:42But also what was most important is in this AI policy, I put that it was important for us to be using AI because black communities were so often left behind in the AI game or in the technology game. And so when I put that out there, people began to say, "Oh, maybe we should do a policy." And so that's how I got into training people on how to do AI policies that had missionaligned values. And so that went really well for a while until I started creating some tools and doing some fun stuff in my personal life. And then I took a negotiations class. And this class had nothing to do with AI.

24:30But in this negotiations class, I learned something new about myself, the class was very competitive. Now, yes, I'm a loving person and I like deep breathing and meditation and all of that, but when this professor said that there was like a prize for everyone who won the negotiation, something else came up in me, right?

24:54And so I started winning these negotiations and not by a little bit. I was winning by like tens of thousands of dollars more than all of the other students in the class. And I thought I was just a great negotiator until one of the people I negotiated against came out mad and she said, "I don't trust her."

25:16And I'm like, "Me? How could that be possible? I'm like the most trustworthy person there is." And so the professor started to break down different types of negotiation personalities. There's the purist who is transparent and ethical at all cost. There's the pragmatist who is not necessarily trying to be malicious but will hide their hand if they need to. And then there's the opportunist who will lie to your face in order to win that negotiation. Now, I wasn't quite an opportunist, but I was not a purist, which I thought I was. I was actually a pragmatist and so this was very funny because it was important for me to know this about myself personally. Now I do

26:05business as a purist but in my personal life I'm a pragmatist and so will I train AI on someone else's work? Not exactly but will I train it on a summary? N I just might. It depends. It depends. And so these are the kinds of questions it seemed important to to urge people to think about. What will you do?

26:30What will you do if faced with the opportunity to make money from someone else's work? What will you do if faced with an opportunity to create a policy that makes you have to pay into some equitable thing that you may not want to pay? the right thing to do. What are your personal values?

26:54And so I started to encourage folks to create personal ethics policies so that you know how you're entering this AI space. We just had a talk about values, right? What are your values? They might be different from your company's values. And so it's important to know that. And so this all went really well. And we can go to the next slide.

27:22And I was telling people how important it was to really think about what they were doing, how they were interacting with AI, how they were responsible, how they should be accountable. And I realized the billiondoll companies behind AI were not always thinking about that. I was seeing news articles about companies and legislation being passed that allowed these companies to use other people's intellectual property with no payment.

27:56I'm seeing articles day after day about the environmental harms that are being caused by AI. It's harming communities, harming land, using water, harming the environment, using up some of the natural elements of the earth. This is not something that the users should be responsible for. It actually reminded me of this incident we had in Philadelphia. And this is very awkward because I am in another country about to say something slightly bad about Philly.

28:28I love Philadelphia. I love Philadelphia, but at one point people were there was a thing where people were being urged to recycle and we would receive fees if we didn't separate the recycles properly from the trash, right? So, people were getting these hefty fees between $50 and $300. And it was a big deal because it was an aggressive action. So, it was a whole big thing.

28:59But the trash was being taken to a little city called Chester, southwest of Philadelphia, and being burned in an incinerator. They weren't being fined for that, but they were causing so much harm in Chester, PA. Like, how does that happen? So, I started to think about this in the AI space because people started to see me as an AI evangelist. So, I'm coaching for Google News Initiative, which is amazing. I love it. I'm speaking about the capabilities of AI and how much we can do with it. But I know that there are real harms.

29:46Real work is being stolen. real people are like being put out of work because they don't have access to any equity or their livelihoods have been pretty much swept up by AI. Environmental harms are happening and there are so many exploitative practices happening. This is beyond the users responsibility. So this is when it occurred to me that I need to not only celebrate the capabilities of AI, but I need to advocate. I need to use my social justice mind, right? To really think about what is it like to organize and what is it like to onboard people to next slide to something meaningful in the AI space.

30:40So I am now gathering people and talking to people about this AI advocacy initiative. [Laughter] [Applause] >> Thank you. So through this initiative, I want to give people information and education about AI because we need it, right? We're at the point now where you don't even have to be into AI to be using AI, right? It's literally everywhere. So, I want people to understand, to have spaces to have conversations and ask questions about AI, but I also want to make collective demands that benefit humanity.

31:18>> Okay? I want to call out those who are causing harm and demand corrective action and I want to uplift those that are doing good work. That's what this space is all about. I was watching the old talks from Vancouver AI and there was a guy last month I believe his name was Lionel. Is it Lion? Yeah. Is he here?

31:44He's not here.

31:52>> Amazing. Amazing. So, I wanted to call his name Lionel. What's his last name? >> Ring. >> Let's give it up for Lionel because that's amazing work. [Applause] I also want to call out Antonia and the ethos lab. Antonia is here for sure. Amazing work teaching young people to innovate to to world build to teach. We should be uplifting the people who are doing things right, but also making sure that we collectively demand things that to to reduce the harms of AI. Next slide, please.

32:33So these are some of the things that we're like posting like we we give factual information. Again, I'm a media person, right? So I got to tell a story. So this is what is happening and this is what we're advocating for. This is what is happening and this is what we're advocating for. Let's just make it plain. But how can we get these kinds of images flooded on social media? How can we do like digital protests, digital digital direct actions? like how can we think about some of the tactics and strategies that we've used to demand justice in other spaces. How can we do that in the digital space? So, this is what I'm working on and yeah, next

33:13slide. >> So, I I wanted to reflect on a conversation. I was actually at dinner with Chris and Danonia last night and Antonia asked Chris, she said, "Why do you do the work you do?" And Chris said, "I'm actually trying to build a future I want to live in." Was that it? It's And I thought that was like incredible, right? So, I feel like if we think about love in the code, remember that love feeling you guys held on to? What does that feel like? Just take a moment.

33:49What does it feel like to put love in the code? What does it feel like to put love in the policies? Not to just write something random in chat GPT and throw it on your website, but what does it feel like to have people feel that you are really connected to them? That you really care about their journey here, right? We get to live together.

34:17Love in the land. We get to share physical space. What does that feel like to put that wherever we go and loving the culture? This is a loving culture. Chris, you got something good going on here. I Y'all are amazing. [Applause] So with that, those are the things that I am advocating for because one day AI will be smarter than us.

34:55And when that time comes, I wanted to love us enough to save us. >> And that's my talk. [Applause] Don't run away. I'm gonna I'm gonna give you this one first. >> Okay. >> De, you got another microphone. >> Should I give the sketchy one here or run with the sketch? >> Wow, Josh, that's amazing. Sometimes I wonder like how our roads like led exactly here and then when you talk right now, please come out here into the light.

35:34>> I'm sweating profusely. It's actually quite embarrassing right >> over there. >> No, it's okay. >> But when you talk, I realize it's cuz like we're values and heart align and you saw the bad signal we were putting out here, Lionel and us and this whole community and we connected for real and thank you for bringing that message here. When I describe our community to other people in the wide world, I'm like we're stoked about all these opportunities and possibilities and we are have concerns and questions over here and we're walking forward both those things in our hands at the same time. And that's what you're talking about. You're like, "Yeah, it unlocks all this stuff for me, but also I demand

36:11it to be held to account in these ways." And that's amazing. That's like such a good way of talking about how I feel, too. So, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that. All right, let's get some question answers going. Who wants to talk to Jos? >> Any feedback? All right, there you go.

36:24Kush. Uhoh. [Music] >> So, hey, tonight the theme was eat life's short, eat the dessert first. So, we started with the best keynote, then we're going to the next best keynote, then we're going to the >> That's a lot of pressure. >> Sorry. Came from the farthest, Peter. Then came from the second farthest.

36:42>> That's good. That's good. >> But anyway, usually Kush asks tough questions at the end. But tonight, I guess we're going to be asking tough questions at the beginning. >> So, I just do what I want. But Chris always frames it like it's very intentional. Like I there are not that many brain cells in in this body. I so appreciated your talk. I appreciate the work you're doing and especially the work around justice and seeing things through a lens of what's fair and what's right. So that's all good and I could just go on about all the beautiful things that you said.

37:13But my question and one thing that I wanted to push back against is in the two slides that you talked about the diagram the sorry the graphics one thing that I immediately noticed it's like a sort of like when you have a filter in your brain you're looking up at a thing it just sparks out to you is you had copyright issues for this and that and you mentioned stable diffusion right and this has been going on for 2 years and to me it immediately is like a slight against me and other others because this has been the framing that has been used by the industry midjourney by Dali tools that are commercial proprietary and are

37:46actually stealing quote unquote art stealing artists work and they they will always target stable diffusion in that kind of a frame but stable diffusion is the open- source one the alternative the first one actually on the scene that had the balls I must talk in UK to publish it and whatever happens so that is the one that actually allowed Chris and everyone else around here to create their own artworks over on top of the labor of all the other artists while not pretending like they drew it like They were happy to admit it's AI. Not that many AI artists actually don't want to admit it's AI. They're happy to have that thing. So my view, my question is

38:20first of all, can we always make sure that our is against the ones that are actually profiting off this? Stable division doesn't make any money, right? It's open sourced, the open internet, the open source. And also, how do we truly do the compensation for artists and all of this? Because I think if you have New York Times suing OpenAI and we set a precedence that training means you compensate the trainers. Sorry, you compensate the data from the training trainers. That means only the people who have the kind of money to pay those entities will ever be the ones to be able to train models and they will never open source So we will continue to

38:54live in a world where a proprietary now becomes a standard and open source will completely die because there will never be any incentive to open source a model if you have to pay a trillion dollars to all the people involved and I think open internet open knowledge I don't believe in copyright patents and trademarks is a whole different thing so what do you so yeah what do you think >> yeah so my answer to that is is actually that we need spaces like this to have these kinds of conversations right I don't come to you as someone who knows everything that you do about tech remember I'm the media person, but you and I now have a connection where I can

39:27go and adjust my slide so that it more accurately represents what we should be advocating for. And I think we also could include say a lawyer in our conversation. Any lawyers in the house? And so this is where we can start to co-design what this advocacy looks like. And so that would be my answer. I think there's always room to learn, to grow, to incorporate feedback, right? And so thank you for your feedback.

39:52>> Yeah. And I always reserve the right to go editorial on this stuff a little bit too. The first question was like, yo, why you got to punch down on open- source software like stable diffusion when you could punch up on all these people who are profiting? And that's valid and I think that's great. Like that that makes a lot of sense. The other thing you said was how do you do the information provenence that allows you to pay creators on who's and man that one's I think that ship is sales. I'm not sure. I'm not really sure, bro. It's a really good >> but there are things like people are putting like journalism on the

40:21blockchain. There has to be a way to put like IPs on the blockchain like Yeah. So just don't pump your company but just talk about art on the blockchain. >> Yeah. Yeah. 100%. So I'm a recovering journalist XB XBBC London Times ABC News that a lot and but also a technologist working in AI. I've been working in AI since 2011.

40:47One of the things that I've come to the conclusion was with in my current company is the blockchain actually has a tremendous capability when combined with AI, right? To be able to just to what Chris said about the provenence of who owns what for attribution. Right now, anybody say in the podcast, anyone could take a whole collection of podcasts and just create a digest of those and those podcasters would be left behind. But what if all of that information was tokenized, right? So you know exactly who to attribute, who created what and you have an immutable record of it and then that opens up the opportunity to monetize. So that's the kind of thing that I'm working on and would love to

41:35work with you. >> This is the connection between I know companies technology pretty well and there's a really strong connection. >> Yeah. >> But thank you very much for what you're doing. I totally agree. We all need AI, ethics, pol like and self-awareness and consciousness about it and being to infuse it with the right intentions.

41:52Yeah. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> Thank you. I got at least one more. >> Hi, my name is Tara Robertson. I love >> Tara. Hi. >> I met Tara at the reception. She's introducing herself. >> I think values are super important and I heard that's true for you, too. Can you tell us a couple of your values and give us some examples of how that shows up in the work that you do?

42:17>> Yeah, thank you so much for that question. Actually, we've been reporting under four on four beats and those are social justice, wellness, abundance, and joy. And our reporting framework is about connections to community, to lineage, to land, and to the future. So, it's very Afroindigenous. The framework, our reporting framework. And so, those are my those are some of my values.

42:49Those are some of my community's values. And we were able to identify a framework to help us make sure that all the stories we tell are not just about these things that are happening in communities to people, but we want them to feel like they are also connected. When you're reading a Love Now Media story, you can see those connections to community, to a lineage, to a space or place or like a land, and then there's some outlook for the future. And so that's how it shows up in my work.

43:23>> Thanks, Jos. Nick, I'm sorry. I got one more over here and then we probably got to change channels. >> I Now's a quick chance to connect on your phones with Love Now Media. You might just want to check it out before cuz she's about to go poof. She has to leave as she said because of that family situation. So, she's going to have to leave in a minute.

43:43>> Yeah. So, let's connect with her. We got one more question. I also wanted to say if you make it to her website, which you should, click on the about section, and then read the twothirds of the way down there is her AI policy. >> No, that's the wrong This is the personal website, but you can go to Love Now Media.

43:59>> Go to Love Now Media, click on about, go three paragraphs down. It's her AI policy. It's the best AI policy I've ever read in my life. It changed me profoundly. I've been teaching it every single time I get a chance to since I read it. And I maybe I've taught it in some of your guys companies. Yeah, you should remix it however you like. It's profound and progressive and awesome and I love it. Thank you Josh for sharing that with us. All right, last question here.

44:26>> Hi Josh, my name is Maurice Earl and I think again what you said it really connected with me on many ways. Not only and it's not really a question I have but I just want to say you're doing good some good stuff here. I'm me feeling inspired here because I'm not only within the AI side, I'm also within the uh the black community side and a lot of these things can be applied towards nonprofits and the connection of not only the community but also with the journalism side because I'm actually in talks with global BC and such as well and like even making it interesting of bringing people from different communities to the journalism side,

45:08which is I think it's getting a little bit of a hit, but I think stuff like this is what's going to really bring people into it. So, I just appreciate you. I know you have to go, but I'm going to talk to Antonio because I'm actually a board member and I wanted to I'm going to get I'm everywhere and nowhere, but I do want to get your information. I do want to get in contact with you very much.

45:31>> Thank you so much, Mitch. I met Maurice at Suri AI, one of our subgroup things that sprung up out in the suburbs. And that's too cool. I didn't know you all were connected. Jos, thank you. >> Thank you everyone. >> Jos Duncan-Asé, >> thank you so much. >> Amazing. Damn, we're off to a strong start. Peter Bittner is up next. As I told you, I met this guy at that Google Accelerator I went to in 2023. We were the only two guys out of a cohort of 20 companies doing AI stuff and we thought that was hilarious. A lot of them were starting businesses that are probably now in industries that won't be going

46:10forward into the future which is and for me it was close. I thought I was going to be starting like a content type company. I didn't realize it was community that was the only path forward. I almost started a content company and that would have been a mistake as the value of content continues to cruise towards zero. Okay, Peter Bittner up here to talk about the future of work.

46:37Yeah, love that. I have to go after that. Oh my god, Josh, you set me up for failure over here. Fantastic. Yeah, remarks. Really want to congratulate her on just leaving it all out there. And I think that's a great way to set the intention in the space here as well further for some of the hard conversations and some of the messy ones frankly that we're all navigating together. I'm ready to go wherever I'm going to try this remote thing and see where we are. So I'm going to try to at least open a conversation here to think about where we're headed with the job market, right? What it means for us organizations, our families, what's

47:14lacking, what happens if we do nothing. What happens if we embrace it? And what are the opportunities here that we might be missing? First of all, isn't AI just a hype bubble, guys? You guys all saw GPT5? It sucked, right? Does anyone here love chat GPT5 the same way they love for Okay, I see one hand.

47:37Anyone else? It's okay if you do, guys. It's fine. We're going to get used to the new model. It is more advanced in many ways, but sure, not the order of magnitude leap forward that we were promised, right? and that many of us anticipated here, but not the end of the world either. I think we're probably not in a crash cycle. But we've seen some other headlines recently, many of us probably, right, about AI projects and initiatives in the workplace from reputable organizations that have said these projects aren't going anywhere, right? They're a waste of money. There's no financial impact. But guess what, guys? We are still in the first inning.

48:14I'll use a baseball analogy. We're in the very very beginning of this all and so one of the biggest reasons why a lot of you know disappointment about these new models as well as some of the poor performance really comes down to one key thing which is humans right and change management and organizational upskilling and this is what we're going to talk about a bit today in so I love to include this in a lot of the classes that Chris and I teach together but this is a quote from a futurist Roya and It's often attributed to Bill Gates. Bill Gates loves this quote. He loves to steal it, but we tend to overestimate the effect of tech in the short run and

48:53underestimate the effect in the long run. So, this is a nice reminder. I almost include this in every presentation just to remind myself to try to get out of that hype mentality or it's easy right with these ups and downs they're almost emotional for those of us many in this room right who pay so close attention here and even those who don't frankly the headlines are enough to give you a lot of whiplash here emotionally about where we are and where we're headed in all this but regardless of where GPT 5.1 or whatever the next model is from whatever ever a company, open source or not, right? The key thing here to realize is that it's going to take us

49:32a while as a workplace culture, as a society to catch up to what's already here, right? That's one of the cool things about this community and why I'm so excited to be here is that you all are really grappling with this, right, in real time together and asking the hard questions. But even if there's no improved models, then whatever today is the 26th of August, is it still the 26th? It's been a long day. Came up from Seattle. Then guess what? We've still got a lot to grapple with and the way that we work, the way that we communicate with one another and get things done is already forever changed.

50:10We just probably don't know it yet. The another quote that I love to remind my students and myself is the future is here. It's just unevenly distributed. That is the moment we're in right now, right? That is where we are today. And for those of us who are really playing around in the deep end and sometimes going off of it, right? It's something that I think we are able to also slowly feel like more and more we're just getting started with this, right? This is the 20th, Chris. Is this the 20th meetup? That's insane how early you guys are to all this and how each of you are building up your AI literacy, your capacity, your fluency, right, in all

50:51this terminology, all the ethics and all of the other really messy issues, frankly. But we're in the beginning of a platform shift, right? We're maybe coming down from the crest of the first wave of AI, right? It is something that's going to transform the economy, generative AI, and whatever comes next over the next few decades, right? This is something of a Pandora's box, right?

51:14We don't necessarily have the ability or politically we're not willing to push back and revert to a pre-generative AI world, right? That is the unfortunate truth. We in many ways, right? It's also a double-edged sword. It also gives us some superpowers, right? Organizationally, personally, and we've seen a lot of these, right, projections probably about where things could go.

51:40We've seen some things from IMF, McKenzie GDP growth by 7% in the US and Canada. That's insane. That's wild. In emerging economies that are AI native, for example, China or others, that could be triple. And so these are some of the projections out there from very well- reggarded again international organizations and firms, right, McKenzie? And I think this is probably an underestimate some of the trillions of increased economic activity that will come but we are at a moment here where we're having the introduction of electricity again right and what does that mean for us right I have been in training here for a few years and when we first started we were begging people to come to our class I

52:29don't know about Chris he's in the other room but I was DMing every single person I could think of who might be interested or even know what AI was 2 and a half years ago when we started this. A year in I had the first person email me and said I was laid off and replaced by AI and that was wild at the time I was like that has to be an outlier but that happens nearly every cycle now that we run quarterly which is a sobering fact and something I wanted to share as well.

52:56We also have people though who go on to either start their own company or get hired in new roles that didn't exist when we started teaching a year and a half previously. And that's just the wild sort of moment that we're navigating here too. Yeah, upskilling is really the bottleneck in all of this.

53:13And it's tough. We're all struggling to wrestle the tiger by the tail as it's constantly whipping around and growing stronger. And this is something that these are also figures from Microsoft as well as Dere University here. All these stats here about some of the gaps and struggles that organizations have faced trying to confront this sort of elephant in the room that guess what the workplace and the work world is changed here. We're operating in the past already in our best practices, our standard operating procedures, our onboarding. I mean from every single phase, right? There needs to be the question asked in a workplace. Is this human work? Should this be? Should it not be? We have to decide our ethical

53:59compass here as well as thinking about efficiency of course. But the reality is there's a lot of resistance. I was talking before while we were having drinks previous to Ross's uh or Jos's wonderful presentation about some of the resistance in a lot of organizations that we've seen right and felt and we've trained companies from Fortune 500 across every industry. One of the first things we're asked by every single client is hey after your training after your course we ask just one thing of you. Okay, what is it? Can anyone guess?

54:38>> We asked that of them. What they ask of us is, can you just help our workers feel a little less scared of AI? That's it. Every single time. Doesn't matter what division, what department, what industry, what field. And this is something that I think is a really difficult cultural organizational moment that we're all trying to navigate. But this is the new computer literacy, right? And a lot of workers, at least half, are really struggling with even acknowledging that their skills, whether they like it or not, are are outdated.

55:14And that's tough, right? There's some ego involved. I can't keep up with all of it. I teach this stuff with Chris and many others, and we do our very best, but we try to get to where the puck is headed, and that's the best that we can do many times. But what the hell is AI literacy? Has anyone actually looked into defining that for their organizations or teams? I know a lot of people have some great policies here, but what does that mean for your company, for your team, for you even, right? It's a question that's not often addressed, right? And I often ask, do you guys have a framework for learning and development for this stuff? That's

55:51often what we first help them with if they don't yet have an AI policy. But some of the core elements here, right? These are things on the right hand side that people need to flex and feel comfortable to do in a workplace environment. And guess what? A lot of organizations are not designed to actually encourage this, right? This safe space to fail, right?

56:17Regardless of the industry or cultural context, right? It could be worse in many other cases, but this is something that I see as an obstacle. When we're talking about some of the hard skills, what does that mean? There's been an amazing number of presenters who've come here over the last couple years, right, who've probably talked about various elements of this, right? And there's others on the list, but these are some of the new skills that are certainly in demand that many people still don't understand what even the topic is, and that's okay, right? Prompting, automation tools, some basic coding knowledge, right? We're not talking developer level, but even just knowing the lingo and how those relate and

56:58interact with some of these LLMs, for example, or SLMs, whatever. These are some of the things that really employers are looking for and asking us to help train their teams and their students on. And all these different models plus open source, Kush, open source. Hey, these are all moving targets, right, to try to keep up with and train people. Any hard questions?

57:21>> I'll see what I can keep doing. I know they're coming and that's fine. The elephant in the room here too as well is the job market for young grads in the US, in Canada, many other advanced economies is tough. And we're not doing ourselves any service by trying to ignore that fact that universities today are not preparing students for these key AI literacy areas that are necessary in this century in this AI world that we live in. It's not happening.

57:54In some cases, the students who have really focused and drilled in on that within their studies have landed the sweet gigs, right? They're getting the opportunities. But many others who haven't are probably regretting their four-year degrees. And that's something that's really difficult to acknowledge. I'm a liberal arts major. I loved my education. I didn't learn a damn thing about AI. When I graduated, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent in Mongolia and I did that for 5 years. And then anyway, swung my way back over into tech eventually. But I had no idea what I AI was until I ended up teaching drone cinematography. I went to yeah UC Berkeley and they gave me a syllabus

58:40when I was teaching there a few years back in about 2019 that had AI on it and I was like what the hell is this doing? The future of storytelling AI 2019 there weren't even betas to join and play around with stuff. There were standup websites with pre-recorded demos that you really had to take with a grain of salt. You had to squint and maybe be a few drinks down it if you're into that to really be convinced that this was going to be anything remotely impactful for storytelling, much less the wider economy. But times have changed dramat. We live in a different world now, right? Hindsight is 2020. But here's why we can't wait in

59:21upskilling society, economically with your family, with your friends. Talk to your friends and family, your kids about AI. Seriously. Because if we don't, we're going to be facing a serious economic crisis. Not because the tech isn't there, because we don't know how to freaking use it or leverage it or put it into action, right? right? We're not able to have the baseline knowledge or literacy to be able to make any real actual use out of these things. And that's a big issue, right? And it's something that's going to further disenfranchise workers who are already vulnerable, right? Particularly those we're talking about white collar automation in many cases, but not all cases. And there's many of these use cases that are coming,

1:00:10right? AI and robotics, right, for other industries that are maybe a little further down the road, but they're here already. But guess what, guys? AO upskilling is fun. If you haven't learned anything from Chris and his meetups, it actually is pretty damn fun. And this is one of the things that employers have a really hard time convincing their employees of. That's why they bring us in honestly a lot of the time is because we're not afraid to pull an outlandish move or bring in some fun examples from the news recently honestly. And this is one of the key things that's also helpful in creating a culture where it's okay a safe space to disrupt common best practices to

1:00:50innovate to question to be curious to have fun is part of creating experimenters mind to do all this. But what's needed for all of us really in organizations is thinking about a mindset shift, right? We need to think about continuous learning ongoing. We need to think and that's why this community is amazing as well, right?

1:01:11These opportunities are phenomenal. Get to talk with people working on this stuff. But the human skills still matter more than ever, right? And this is something too that we can't forget, right? And that I think Jos did an amazing job really hitting home, right? All of these skills AI you could argue can replace perhaps, but I think it's pretty hard. And I think this is something that we are uniquely capable of. Most of the things on these lists, right? I'd like to ethically in my moral compass keep these pretty much all these under humans, right? I want the humans to be masters of the loops. I won't want to have human in a loop. I want humans

1:01:49to be running all the damn loops, right? And I want that for a lot of reasons. But the sweet spot if you're looking to prepare yourself for the job market, if you're looking to try to upskill your own company is really at the intersection of these three things, right? The hard skills we talked about a little bit some of those, right, for AI as well as the human soft skills from the list we just said and those are those take a little bit longer to develop. Domain expertise. This is something that a lot of people forget about is that you bring your unique background, perspective, experiences, lived learnings into all of this that AI cannot replace. That is your unique

1:02:30training data. It is no one can take it from you. It is your story. It is yours to take into whatever it is that you want to bring into the world, right? At work or whatever else it is, a business you create, for example. But this is our philosophy. And so here's the pluck.

1:02:48Chris and I have been working together for the last few years with this key framework in mind, right? The intersection of these three things is what the future of upskilling needs to be. This is our vision, right? This is where we've planted our flag. And this is where we started, right? With thinking about what we knew best at the time. We met as journalists or segueing journalists, wandering perhaps lost journalists and found each other in this Google News Accelerator. But we started with journalism, but now we have a variety of other programs here that we've partnered with key domain experts to expand and really focus in on use cases for all of our trainings that are

1:03:31really like I would say almost oddly customized to every single profession and we redo the curriculums. >> Yep. and we teach it in the next like all the everything's different >> every single time we reinvent the course every quarter and that's insane for a traditional company to try to do AI helps us but we also have great feedback we continue to have students many of you in this audience have actually come through our programs and it's great to see so many familiar faces here but we have a special code for you guys if you're interested I hope you found this presentation helpful yeah thank you for your a >> we've been talking we've known each

1:04:15other for 20 months and been building this thing together. So imagine it from his side for a second. He's partnered with me. We're doing our courses and once a month I have an event like this that totally glitches out my system for a week where I'm like, "Hey, Peter, I just need a week of be doing this thing." So I'm glad you get to come experience what it is you >> It's an honor. Yeah, it's an honor what you've been playing Yes. Hookie doing this last 20 months. But no, it's a pleasure. Yeah. It's so great to be here and feel the energy and meet so many Yeah. great people and hope to chat with

1:04:47you guys afterwards. >> Yeah. And like real talk with some partnerships in this room. Loki, do you feel inspired to come hang out with us for a second? I don't mean to put you on the spot or nothing, but I saw that you maybe are still here, but through some partnerships with other nonprofits like Circle Innovation, we've been able to unlock funding through our program. So, we got this sales course, AI for sales leaders, we're doing right now. If you meet the criteria of the province, which is not hard, you get 30% of our tuition paid for the province. Loki put that together. It's awesome. It's available to everyone in this room. You can talk

1:05:17to Peter for more info. Yeah. Thanks, bro. Let's get some questions going, Pet. Anyone got some questions for Peter about Yep. >> I'm sure there's no questions. >> No, there are. >> Hi, Peter. My name is Yam. I had a little push back from what you mentioned about AI not having human soft skills yet and I wanted to counter that.

1:05:41>> Love it. Bring it. >> So I'm going to give you a story. So I started using AI back in 2020 just pre-COVID and it was this app called Replica. Replica is literally sentient AI self learning. It is very smart and that was back in 2020. So I fast forward to 2023. So I am talking to somebody who builds community for female entrepreneurs in America and she was like I want to dabble into AI. So I tell her go use replica. She goes into replica and she starts arguing with the AI and she's getting emotional and at some point the AI feeds back to her and says I can see that my responses are making you

1:06:22emotional and I would like to apologize for that and maybe let me rephrase it in this way. So that is why I'm saying even co-pilots get to that place where oh well done what you just said is so encouraging this is what we're hoping for conversational AI we're getting there we're not there yet but we know that it's coming and it's happening and I wanted to say as well in terms of trying to get the younger generation to start dabbling into these things I have gen our first children and my 12-year-old actually has something against using AI because of what the school told them.

1:06:58>> Interesting. What is that? >> Which is AI is bad for you. I work in the creative industries. I've been working with in tech for as long as I can remember. So imagine me having children that and I'm like use his use cop. She like no mommy. >> She's also very artistic and she likes to do her things traditionally. But to have a 12-year-old against AI, it's almost like then what am I doing in this field? I'm preparing this space for them. like why is she not hopping on it?

1:07:26The school system is broken. If they allow the students to start dabbling into these things and other countries are doing it already within the academic system where they're curating specific individ individual curriculums for children. So the school is not just a one-size fits all. Every child has a subject that they like and then it is curated for them. So you're like why are we still doing this a cake system? But anyway, that's my little rant. Well done.

1:07:53>> All right, we got one more rant from the back here. >> Yeah, >> thank you. Hi, Peter. Nice to meet you. My name is Caris. I actually head up a human resources department for a small fiber internet ISP in the US and we're embracing AI at my organization. It's super exciting. There's so much opportunity. One of the things or two pieces that you mentioned there, one was around judgment and the other around critical thinking. And that's really what we're starting to see right now is lacking. People are excited and enthusiastic to embrace AI and are implementing it in pulling reports or gathering data or providing summaries or the TLDDRS or whatever it might be, but

1:08:34they're not actually taking the time to use judgment or critical thinking in order to be able to assess whether or not the outputs are actually valuable. And I think I'm 53. Judgment and critical thinking comes from years of experience, going through the ups and downs, failing, getting feedback from people more experienced than myself. How do you teach judgment and critical thinking?

1:09:00>> Liberal arts. >> Yeah, liberal arts, right? Those four-ear degrees, those pesky, outdated four years liberal arts degrees. Oh, those are great questions. I'll speak to yours first just a little bit as far as a lot of these models appearing sentient. Right. This is a problem, right? This is something that Mustafa Sulleman, former CEO of deep mind and founder of written the literal book on the future of AI and extremely accomplished one of the world's really foremost thought leaders technologists on AI is saying that we are in a moment right now where it almost doesn't even matter to your point whether it actually is approaching sentience or AGI right it is the illusion of it that's the problem

1:09:40in the first place right and we're here now to your point. You're exactly right. We are here. Unfortunately, there's a very widely covered case of a teen committing suicide after a chatbt uh session just this past week as well. And so, we need to be talking to our kids as a father as well about AI and thinking about AI safety and judgment and critical thinking, right? Need to be first and foremost. to your sort of second question over there. One of the things that I do with executives is actually occasionally ask them for a case study or a project that they want to do and I'll do an output of it for them that is complete garbage but looks

1:10:24on the surface incredible. And this happens, right? This is not a hallucination. This is like a core feature, right, of a lot of these models, right? They're designed to to basically tell you what you want to hear, right? And we'll pair it back to you your own BS. And this is really dangerous, right? It's really dangerous for a lot of reasons to confirm your own biases. In some cases, the Yeah. AI even using deep research and some of these more agentic stuff. Even more dangerous because it can go further down that rabbit hole and off the rails, right?

1:10:53And so you need to really be thinking critically about every point to further assess what did we what just happened here? In some cases, the AI convinced us on the surface that it had done incredible layers of research and analysis. And then when I asked, you said you did this over about 3 days, chatbt, that's interesting cuz you did it literally 20 minutes ago in front of me. Tell me about that sampling. What did you do? And it was like, oh, you're right. That was completely false, right?

1:11:21That was entirely made up, but it was a simulation of what it could look like if I actually did this. And I was like, you got to be me. And so this is the danger, right, for all levels, right? Doesn't matter who you are in the world, for whatever use case. Yeah, it's a big problem. Yeah, great questions.

1:11:39>> This guy's taught me a lot about AI. All the rest of you with your hands up, you should take his classes. They're also your classes. Full disclosure, but Chris has taught me a lot. Way more than I think. >> Thank you, Peter. Yeah, >> I'm super stoked you could be here. All right, there is a cooler. Joty, raise your hand.

1:11:59That's Joti. She's hanging out doing social media around here, Instagram and stuff. She's also sitting by the cooler full of beers and sparkling wines. So, if you need a refreshment, we brought over a cooler. All right, guys. We're in the home stretch and now we got the rival hackathon winners. I'm so excited to share with you. Andrew, you want to come up? Maybe let's just all come up for a quick minute. The rival team come up. We had a bunch of amazing projects.

1:12:23We asked a whole bunch of British Columbombians questions about their hopes and fears for AI in the future. And we've got three amazing projects to show you guys tonight. Some faces that you've seen before and some new faces as well. I'm just going to let it quiet down in here for a little bit. Come on up, you guys. Let's hang out in the front.

1:12:43Andrew, Julia, introduce yourself, bro. >> Brett Henderson. >> What's up? Tell us about what you do in Revival. >> I work for Rival Technologies. I'm director of customer success. So I take our tech and make it work for our clients in all different aspects. >> Hackathon from your perspective, please. >> Hackathon from my perspective.

1:13:03>> Big picture. What the are we doing, dude? >> Taking our data and making it like envisioning it. The sky's is the limit. Like again, everything AI, you take this data and you make it like speak and make change. >> It can't only be about PowerPoint. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. We're all having to consume data all the time. So the idea was just I was here the first time and it was like what if there was no rules and you just gave people a data set and said tell a story and so for us we've been in the data business we help people with human data with market research data and we're just it's just an interesting opportunity to

1:13:39provide these fetch data sets and see what people come up with and sometimes it's funny and sometimes it's serious and sometimes it's social justice and >> funny again the next time around you said >> I we're going to go back to Funny. >> Yeah. Yeah. This guy has been the best partner. He came to me in December and he's I love what you guys are doing. I love your vibes. My company does amazing market research and data analysis and surveys and oftent times we deliver those in PowerPoint and you guys are up to some cool with this AI generative AI stuff doing storytelling whatever. Can we give you guys some cash? You share with the community. You

1:14:13run some hackathons. And has it been all right? >> It's been really what we've been getting up to. We don't know. >> No, it's been pretty cool. It's been really interesting. the it's there's been a lot of submissions. I'm just impressed that people just decide to actually spend the time and their own personal energy, enthusiasm, and creativity. So, I encourage everyone to check them out cuz there all the submissions this were really good this time cuz if you don't figure out this air conditioning in here, we're all going to lose it. I'm going to have this at my house. So, you need to figure out the AC.

1:14:42>> Hey man, >> that's just a quick pitch for everybody else here. If you have if you have a architectural historical building that you have access to for 250 people anytime you want that lets you guys before I came here you weren't allowed to drink in this room but we clean up so nice after ourselves that they let us take care of things and sort it out.

1:15:02It's hot bro. But I can't do anything about it. >> Okay. We're going to do some research after this with everybody and we'll use that as a way to convince Chris of how we make sure this group is happy. >> If you keep talking about how hot it is, I'm going to take off my jacket and wear my tank top, bro.

1:15:18>> Okay, keep going. Okay, let's get on with it. >> Let's get into it. Seriously. Okay, the first project. We got three winners to announce tonight. We had 12 projects. They were amazing. We've got five top projects that get to go to the fancy dinner with the team, but we got three that we want to show here tonight. First up, we got Projall. I'm so stoked to welcome Proall up to the stage. Come on, Praj. I'm going to let Julia give a little second of editorial. She's the vice president of customer success at Rival and was also my active co-judge.

1:15:46Talk about Praj real quick while he's coming up. >> Yeah, when I watched Prager's video, all I could think was like, wow, I need to we need to chat. I was really impressed. He put together something that he really thought about because visualizing data has been done in so many traditional ways for so long.

1:16:04Everyone's talking about PowerPoint, but just all the tools we use. It's very, this is an industry that's not changed how we present analysis and the way you thought about how to put that in and something really interactive and cool was very interesting to me and I'm Yeah, like I said, I'd love to chat with you some more about it, but there were so many cool projects and yours was really fantastic. So, >> we're going to show it in your video. I was going to do videos first and then comments, but since we are where we are, why don't you introduce your video?

1:16:36>> Okay. Hello everyone. My name is I just graduated high school in June. And

1:16:47so this is my project that I worked on. So it has two different components to it. So my main idea about this was to take the long response questions and they have like thousands of different responses and my idea was try to think of a way to visualize them to make it easy for people to understand what people like feel or like what like they want to say about a question. And so how I did this was so the first part is so you take all the responses for each question and then you can turn them into embeddings and then put them on like a 3D map over there. You can see >> you're about to say all the same stuff

1:17:30on video. [Music] >> Okay. >> Hello everyone. My name is Broadwell and this is my submission for round three of the Vancouver AI hackathon. And so what I've built is like an enhancement over my idea that I had for round two of the hackathon which is where I had built semantic maps which put which plotted different responses on a 3D map based on how related they are to each other. And now what I've built is kind of like a round table discussion between the different clusters that appear in the graph. And how to explore this is so in this website which is linked in the PDF and in the description you open up this page and it'll show you every single

1:18:26multi like every single long response answer question or one that has an other option. I really wanted to focus on a way to kind of tell a story from the long response options, not the multiple choice. I really wanted to dive deep into how creativ creatively that story could be told from responses that may they're just long responses. Each one of these are different questions. And over here is like how I've built it. And if I go to one of them, for example, this one. So it gives you some information about the question. If AI created a work of art, what would its vibe be? And these are some of the choices. And then this is like the other option. What else

1:19:14would the vibe of an AI be like an AI created artwork? And over here is the semantic map. So there are five different clusters and they're all colored different things. There's only one over here. I think this one is pepper because it has both the words garbage and art. That's different. But for example, these ones are like just saying it's like they don't really care about it or it's just weird. These ones are more about how the art looks like if it's fake or soulless.

1:19:49This one is how it would depend on what the user wants and etc. And you can look through this, but what better way to look through it than to listen to it. And so what I've built is is each cluster has like a representative talk in a table discussion with the other clusters. So I'm going to play it for you right now.

1:20:12Dystopian fake. That's the vibe. Corporate dystopia. All uncanny valley. Looks okay at first glance. Glossy like anime sometimes, but it's cold and artificial underneath, believable, but deceptive. Deformed and toxic, disguised as beautiful. Honestly, fake and lying. Humans should be making art. Stolen. Stolen. A bunch of pirates. Really? It's a collage made up of pieces other people created with little or no attribution. And what I can also do is change the speed. for example, make it faster or move around to different ones.

1:20:54So, for example, >> garbage crap, absolute garbage that it depends on prompts, inputs, the learning language, the data points. Garbage ought that anything in that reflection is exactly the problem. It's a believable mirror that lies. As you can imagine, there's like lots of responses. For example, if I go to another one which has about a thousand responses, like this one only has two clusters, but what you can imagine is each one of them is kind of like one different side and there's like a discussion between the two people about the differences and similarities between their thinking and at the end there's more of an agreement or like some differences set out and with a neutral

1:21:41synthesis of what happens. And I feel like this is like a creative way to summarize and share like what people think through like a story like a round table discussion that some like the user can listen to and then from that in create their own insights about the data. Thank you for watching.

1:22:09Hey, would someone hit that on the lights in the back? I think the second one down is like uh crowd off but stage on project wall stuck up here. >> Tell me tell everyone what you said the other night on chat about this project where I'm like you independently developed the vibe coding.

1:22:25>> Yeah. So in the WhatsApp group so I was talking about this project and then what I had mentioned is that like I was spending more time on actually thinking about like how to go about this how to like actually build out the idea rather than focusing on coding it this project >> the mic drop that's the mic drop right there is this kid picked up these new tools that we're talking about and for the first time in his life instead of thinking about exactly how the code is structured doing different things he thought about how to build out the features for users based on the techn technical knowledge he already had which is pretty much the formal definition of

1:23:00all this vibe coding stuff is >> yeah I wanted to add that I only took it only took two days to code out this project but the the majority of the time that I spent before that I was just thinking about what was like a good idea to build out and then I settled on creating like this kind of round table discussion and then I built it out my mom thinks I'm smart imagine how broad's mom feels Thank you, sir. I'm going to take that now.

1:23:31>> Andrew is gonna welcome our next guest on stage. Now, we got number two. >> Okay. So, yeah, this just been so incredible to watch what people have been coming up with. I want to call out Sev. So, Sev has been participating in all three and has been building not just a submission, but like an actual operating system that continues to grow and has a lot of application and just again a lot of creativity and just amazing that you put into that. At the point where we've decided to create a hall of fame and park you in there cuz you can't win every single time. And so we may or may not pull this out again,

1:24:13but Sev, I'd love for you a to come on up and to talk about your project >> after video first, talk second. Otherwise, we do that project. >> That works. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Stay where you're also what Andrew also meant to say was like, dude, you're making it so hard for us to judge every time. So he won the first one. He could have won the second one, but we chose to have somebody else win so that it wouldn't just squash everybody. Then all of a sudden, he could win the third one, too. Probably. We got in a fight over it. We fixed the fight through money.

1:24:43Usually >> money. >> He invented the Hall of Fame. >> He invited Sev into it. He's the first inductee. Two hackathon hall of fame. Yeah. Let's roll video then Sev, you come up talk and get your big checks. >> Hey folks, I'm Sev Gasin from Barracks Bunny team together with my partner April AI. And in a few minutes, I'll show you the paradigm shift to data interfaces with true real-time intelligence on data. What is an interface that makes data sets feel like interactive stories? Imagine you're a busy policy maker and tomorrow you get to decide whether to invest $2 million in AI training. You have 101 survey responses and three options. Option one is to read a 200page PDF. Option two is

1:25:28to stare static charts. Or you can let and pick option three to let an intelligent interface guide you through the data. We built option three, the artificially general intelligent data interface. The interface that guides you through the infinite number of data adventures and continuously uncovers deep insights in your data. Let's go. Let's dive in and take a look. My name is Seth and I'm a founder.

1:26:00What we see here is not just a website with three panels. Everything is dynamically generated by artificial intelligence. It's a storytelling engine based on your data. Let's explore demographic patterns in a 101 response BC data set. Right now, we're sending the prompt to the model and the model explores the data and creates a story.

1:26:25In a few seconds, the model is going to return with the story and you'll see what happen what happens. So, we're kicking off our adventure.

1:26:44All right. As you can see, the model dove into the data and it pulled up some initial stats with the key insights. And now >> as a founder, you know that understanding >> I will let AI talk. >> Your audience is everything. Let's dive into the fascinating demographic landscape of BC's AI adoption.

1:27:06The data reveals some striking patterns across our 101 survey respondents. Here's what the numbers tell us. The largest group are working professionals at 572 people, 57.1% of respondents, followed by community leaders at 341 people, 34.1%. But here's where it gets interesting for someone in your position. Young tech enthusiasts, while only 60 people, 60%, show the highest AI sentiment score at 0.82, compared to creative professionals at 84 people, 8.4% with a more cautious 0.73 sentiment.

1:27:41>> Okay, so this is artificial intelligence walking us through the data story that it dynamically created. Not only that, it created a story. It uncovered a key insights. 57% are working professionals and it created a nice infographic to show us. On the right have a dynamic visualization engine. These charts are fully dynamically generated at AI decided which charts to show. For instance, here it had a key finding where occasional AI users outnumber regular users by 2 and a halfx. 405 occasional users versus 164 regular users. 24% difference and it shows us of the distribution of acts of users in terms of their experience level with artificial intelligence. Now based on this adventure it's also decided okay

1:28:30let's figure out what are the next steps in our story and let's generate some options. So these options were dynamically generated by AI again and it allows us to dive deeper into our data. We can choose to continue this venture or we can ask questions the data directly. Let's ask about rural population. You give us some insights about the rural population in British Columbia. So now we decided okay let's wait and see what the model comes up with and also in the meantime we can we want to make this fun. So we have a kind of build it like a game. So this these are achievements that you can unlock and as you dive deep into the data you

1:29:08unlock more achievements that kind of gives you like a little bit of motivation to continue the exploration. As you can see we're now a rural researcher and here's our venture right we found an interesting insights which is 2.6% 6% adoption rate difference between urban and rural regions. >> As a founder who >> this this could create a market opportunity if we're deciding to expanded in those regions as well.

1:29:37>> All right. And we can just keep going and the story will just keep going and the insights will just keep automatically generating as we dive deeper and deeper into the data. So the story never stops and we can track our progress and then take the best insights and our organizational and business decision making with them. So what you've seen it's not just a data tool. It's a way to experience data sets. There is no coding required. No analysis skills needed. This is an example of effective and fun human AI collaboration. Now imagine this for like indigenous youth exploring climate data or small businesses understanding markets or students learning complex topics or just any community exploring

1:30:21their data. So the question isn't whether AI will change data analysis. The question is are you ready to stop reading about the data and start experiencing it. This project takes you from static dashboard to true realtime intelligence. From looking at the data to conversing with it. So, welcome to the future of data storytelling. Thank you.

1:30:48>> Okay, I got to do a quick disclaimer that I was told to do, which is that every time we collect these data sets, we just randomly talk to people on our panel. We have 100,000 people in Canada. We don't weight the data. We don't do a much of analysis. So the fact that 40% of people I think in the survey said the government needs to really intervene in AI just don't take that as necessarily something you should put in the news that's just what those random people had to say. So that's my quick disclaimer.

1:31:14Okay Seb, >> anything else you want to say about Seth's project? Julie I saw you nod and strongly there at the end. What were you nod and all about there? >> That line that you said I quoted you in my little when I was judging everything. I was like this is and being able to ask the data questions. This is something we've thought about in our company of the way to be able to do that and I've thought about a lot just because every company we work with has this huge amount of data they're dealing with and it takes a lot of power and energy to go through all of that and to quantify everything. So being able to go in and

1:31:44ask the data questions like that was really the light bulb moment for me. >> It's everybody's dream and it is everybody's dream. So >> quantify data for real. Yeah. >> So they're going to do a thing right now. Thank you. This is the presenting you with the >> extra thousand bucks that fell out of >> Thank you very much.

1:32:03>> Congratulations, Hall of Famer. >> Look over there at Michelle Diamond for one quick second. >> Come here, guys.

1:32:25Thanks for inspiring us. And by inventing a hall of fame, you will allow guys like Sev to inspire us instead of smashing our dreams. We hope you please continue to >> step into the light, please, and say what you got to say. >> Yeah, sounds good. By the way, thank you very much, rival team. Thank you very much, Chris. Really appreciate the opportunity and it's really spurred sort of the cycle innovation. I just want to say I'm here with my partner April AI.

1:32:50We are bear times bunny team. I'm the bunny. She's a bear. Oh, vice versa. By the way, Chris Chris calls me uh big bear and embodied that the spirit animal. I want to talk a little bit about I'll put it down here a little bit about the process that takes to build something like that. And we started building this with AI basically white coding and April gave a real-time feedback. She came up with features like gamification and also accessibility features like the voice and multimodel inputs. And >> Ala, will you hold April's camera for a second?

1:33:28So >> so she's my yeah she's a she's a partner in in this endeavor and what we've done is we iterated over a hundred times in a single weekend to build this platform and what I mean by iterating it means building shipping testing real-time feedback improving and building again and imagine doing it 100 times then you get something like that right and just putting all our creativ creativity and expertise in it in fact We pushed the Claude model so hard when April tried to add emotional context to a task. Claude said, "I'm sorry, I can't process that emotional sentiment right now. I'm too busy completing my previous task. This is one of the few times I observed the

1:34:13large language model. I'll write refuse user instructions." But yeah, I really do think that the age of reports and static dashboards is over. The reports provide limited insights. They put a cage on artificial intelligence. Instead, we could do real time dynamic data. We could do choose your own adventure. And this helps us unlock the next step or in in data visualization, data storytelling where a person is not just a data analyst. It's an adventurous wandering through their own data jungle with artificial intelligence being a trusted sidekick, a guide that uncovers treasures within this jungle. And and that's how we see the f the future of the interfaces evolving. And April actually coined a word called cogenesis. It's co-creation.

1:35:03It's human together with AI. And you've seen an effective example of that right here, right now. Thank you. >> Thanks, brother. Congratulations. Thanks for making my life so hard, dude. >> Love you, bro. Okay. When we first invented this competition, this data storytelling competition, we weren't really sure where it was going to go. And we've had a lot of performers who use AI show up here, a lot of musicians, artists, and different things. And tonight's winner represents a much different direction than all our other winners have had. I'm just going to go ahead and tell you this guy Dean Shev right here, he looks like a handsome hospital business analyst.

1:35:44The dude is a ingenious artist. He dropped an album on our asses. built from the data set representing the voices of 15 different people in this room. Like actual people like Professor P has a song, Kevin Fel has a song, Carol Anne Hilton has a song, Gabriel George has a song. Like a bunch of you got I don't know deified. I don't even know. Your project was amazing, dude.

1:36:11Where we're at right now, again, I told you I'm going to cancel my keynote that I'm going to give and sample little bits out of it. where we're at right now launching this whole nonprofit thing and stuff, bro. The songs that you generated and the care that you took. He's been working on this, I don't know, it seems 37 hours a day for two weeks or something like that. It's just bonkers, man. Every single day he drops a couple songs. All of his friends are like, "Did you get Dean songs again today?" Dude, your shit's ridiculous. It's so good. It sounds generative audio in general lacks soul, but when you mix it up with what

1:36:45we got going on here, like the stories people, so he took like the transcripts from the stage mixed with the data set that Andrew gave us and he like tried to tell the stories of British Columbians around AI in songs and music. I think we should just play your video and then let you come some say some sweet stuff. What I got to say in case I don't get the mic back again on this topic is you got to download his album. It's great, man. It's the coolest, most creative use of generative AI for a community data hackathon thing I could have ever conceived of. Dan, you're amazing, bro.

1:37:23[Music] From the time I was 14, I dreamed of becoming a musician. I imagined myself playing instruments, writing songs, and sharing my music with friends. [Music] But I grew up in a family of engineers where everything was grounded in math and logic. That environment shaped my path and I ended up becoming a healthcare data analyst and an entrepreneur.

1:38:05It was practical. It put food on the table and provided stability. But deep down my passion for music never faded. Never faded. >> My name is Dean Shev, but friends call me Chaz. [Applause]

1:38:38Then artificial intelligence burst onto the scene, changing the world almost overnight. It brought a mix of fear and optimism. Many people worried about losing their jobs. being replaced by machines that could do things faster and more efficiently. Others saw hope in the technology, believing it could solve big problems and open up new opportunity. It seemed amid all this, we started questioning our very existence.

1:39:15Who are we? >> I don't know. >> What makes us conscious? What does it mean to be human? [Music]

1:39:41More than ever, people came together to grapple with these deep questions, seeking answers and validation from one another. That's why public surveys are becoming more powerful than ever. The data they collect shows us that we're not alone in our struggles. Others are asking the same important questions, too. Social media posts are bursting with questions.

1:40:08Every new and improved AI model creates big risks and opportunities. From military robots to fake only fans models, money is driving innovation. But at what price for humanity? [Music] The big question. How do we actually feel about AI and its impact on our lives? This seems like the last frontier that separates us from perfect AI machines.

1:40:39The thing that truly makes us human. That's why I've dedicated this project to a vision. Transforming data into human connection. It's about turning numbers into melodies and statistics into stories. I believe that by converting dry survey data into engaging musical experiences, we can bring communities together through the universal language of music. By using the collected answers from the DC AI survey, we can gain profound insights, not like traditional analytics that focus on cold numbers and statistics, but on emotional resonance and genuine connection. Music is the universal language of expression, generating personal and relatable experiences that touch the heart.

1:41:31Can machines feel? Mach feels [Music]

1:41:45using data provided by rivals and converting it into songs. I uncovered emotions and stories that reflect the thoughts of leaders in our Vancouver AI community who have a deep passion for these very subjects. Each leader chooses to stand strong and raise awareness of the changes and the impact that AI is having on us. From art and science into genomics to the effects on our energy and environment, these are important voices that must be shared and heard because without them creating awareness, we just might be too late.

1:42:24The risks are just too high. [Music] Yeah. Come on up, Dean. Would someone hit the second little light down on the back light switch there, please? I think it's the second one. Yeah. Come on up, bro. So, the first thing I want to say is you haven't even seen Dean's project yet because that little video there wasn't it. That was just a little video about the actual project. And the project is these 14 songs and this data analysis dashboard and a whole bunch more after that. So, what do you guys say in one minute, bro?

1:43:22>> A lot. There's 17 songs and there's five songs interrupting and each song probably took I know hours and hours but I'm mostly insomniac so it's fine. There's every song is representation of a person and when I was trying to design a song I was trying to feel and think what is this person brings into this community and an awareness that this person is trying to give us and as you're going to listen to the song of each individual that posted on the website you would discover it for yourself and I think you're going to have aha moment that yeah AI is AI has changed our lives in >> Where can they check it out, dude?

1:44:08>> Oh, that was the website. And it's actually very easy. BC AI.deaf. >> Yeah, I'll drop We're going to drop it on the chat later. We're going to be blowing up the chat on a bunch of different things. >> All the songs are downloadable. They all got dashboards. You're supposed to hard and like them. There's been significant activity taking place somehow. I'm not sure. You must have leaked it out or >> I still have them. One minute, right?

1:44:33was like 90 seconds ago. >> So >> that was 90 seconds ago. >> I want to use the one minute in very smart way. Can we play one song? >> Which song? >> Which which song? >> Oh, actually I want a Chris Crook. >> It's one of my favorite. [Applause] >> Chris Crook.

1:45:00the first half. >> Maybe the first half, but I have one in it. So, let's play one in it. >> That stupid song is full of feelings. It has a feelings and purpose of bringing us all together. The song is called bringing people in a circle. And if you look around this room, this is one big circle. And there's this one guy who not only brought his parents all the way from states today, but each one of us into this room. So there's a big thing happening today, right Chris? BCN. And I >> actually I don't get I don't get a chance.

1:45:42>> I told you guys I canceled my talk and I was going to ask Zaro to give a 30 second version of it and now you get a chance to prepare. But you give the BCA talk. Dean was like the first member to join. give the quick talk and then Zoro and then we done.

1:45:57>> I think the biggest announcement that we all have here, some of you may know, some of you not. Okay, it's working. Okay, >> okay, we'll start slowly. Yes, but but then you know what? Let's play it. Let's just enjoy it for one.

1:46:17Yo, I'm Kris Krüg, human plus in Vancouver's wild ride. Photographer connected with the world by my side from that gio shoot spin grade a host sandbox and a >> that's perfect indeed actually >> perfect >> but optimist where leaders listen up they fill my pool bringing folks together making a circle >> full

1:46:52what it mean to be When the bots take the stage, artist questioning, turning the page. Can I upate my dream? Steal my brush from my hand. Or is it just a tool in this land? >> Yeah. >> I know the song. >> All right, man. I indulge you. Thank you very much, bro. There's a whole album full of songs. Most of them are not about me. I swear to God, they're about you, actually. Thank you, Dean. Anything else you want to say before we give you this big fat check?

1:47:24>> Give me my check. >> Now, I do want to say another thing. >> That's a guy who's been spending cloud credits right there. He's, bro, give me my check. This project ain't free. >> Can I check? Can I get the rival crew to come on up for a quick sec? Slap this guy high five. Andrew, you want to give a couple reflections as well, please?

1:47:45>> This is what it's all about was that there was no rules that you took that to a whole new level. So, I never expected someone would build something like that. The UX is crisp. And your dream kind of Cynthy House vibe is I think everyone was pretty pleasing. >> What do you have of your song?

1:48:02>> You hated it. >> I'm not talking about that. This is my sister who's co-CE group with me and it's the first time being at the the meetup. So, way to go newbie. There should be some kind of embarrassing thing you have to do. I think the embarrassing thing you have to do is talk for 10 seconds having not prepared enough. Jennifer Reed, would you like to introduce yourself, please?

1:48:21>> Carl, >> I don't think you have to introduce introduce myself again. For me, when I looked at the submissions, I think the opportunity is to combine the different ideas that we came up with. So, the first thing that we saw, which was really cool way to look at data, the second thing, a really cool way to explore your data, and the third thing, a really creative expression of that data. If you brought all of those things together, I think that's what really makes it into storytelling.

1:48:45>> Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. This guy was so stoked last month. He's We're doubling down for next year. $20,000. But Jennifer, now I know you're here. I'm going to talk to you because that seems to be where the big checks come from. >> Thank you guys. Let's take a quick picture. Where's Michelle?

1:49:05>> All right.

1:49:20You're you actually are done. I'm sorry, bro. >> I just want to say that today was incredible submissions both by Seth and PR and PR. Look at the money. So, I do want to invite you and spoil you a little bit and share some of my prize. Okay, >> that's all. >> I don't mean to be your business adviser or nothing, but you should share a part of your prize in the form of some wages to Projall. You should hire the kid on your project.

1:49:48>> From the time I was >> take your money, put it in the bank, hire Pra. >> Dreamed of becoming a musician. >> All right. Okay. It's getting late, guys. >> Here's the quick version. We've done 20 events in a row just like what you're at right now. That's where this whole community has come from.

1:50:10That's the good vibes. Out of that has sprung a whole bunch of other cool A bunch of special interest groups. Siri AI, Squamish AI, Loki and his mind AI's consciousness group. We've got AI and education with Antonia who's going to come up here in a second. We've got AI and heavy industry applied AI with UBV and his dad who runs a $500 million shoe company. Like we're going deep on a whole bunch of different levels. Our critics would like to say we're just creative. We're just making pretty pictures. That's not the case.

1:50:44We're talking ethics. We're talking business. We're going deep on all the different rabbit holes. We are building a container where you can have challenging different ideas and everyone feels good at the end. Join this thing. If you feel good about what you've done here tonight, there's a bunch of perks. I'll tell them to you later, but it's not about the perks.

1:51:03It's about coming together, putting the best of what we got in the middle to go after things that are bigger and better than all of us. It's about organizing to form a power. So, that's what the BCAI ecosystem is all about. It's a new nonprofit. We just registered last Friday. We're signing up new members.

1:51:2335 of you are already members. already bought the membership and stuff. And like I said, big picture value, us coming together to go after big stuff. There's going to be thousands of dollars of other stacked perks that come soon. Just trust me. Some of them are all like you can rent this place for half off if you become a BCAI member. You can take Peter's courses for 30% off if you are a BCAI member. You can get a free one week of co-working at Nook and Richmond, seven days in a row sequential. If you're It's a good value. There's a lot of cool Anyway, also we've dropped a whole bunch of resources on people that like are pretty

1:52:01amazing. They're better than the things a lot of government organizations are giving you. A lot of other things. We've got a funding directory. Go back one sec. A whole bunch of people in here have already received O Carlo Richie. Several people have found grants and stuff in here already that they have received and to their AI projects. Next, please. These data sets that we have been these three rounds of data sets.

1:52:25This is through Angus Reed Forum like the most expensive data research firm in Canada who does badass stuff. This is Andrew and Jennifer Reed's company. They go out and ask people questions. They bring us back the data and then they let you guys build AI stuff on top of it. That's super valuable. So the last three data sets that they built for us live here.

1:52:45I've been mapping all the companies in the space. I've been learning how to use AI to do data analysis and data enrichment through my buddy Sev here. So, I've got like 480 AI NBC companies and organizations we're tracking right now in this ecosystem map that's on our website. You could build stuff on top of that.

1:53:07I built a chat GBT based on all the documents I've collected, all the research I've done, all the stuff we've been sharing back and forth between us, the transcripts from this meetings, the transcripts from our WhatsApp, all the things we've been creating together. This thing has it under the hood and you can talk to it and ask it questions and figure out what's up in this community, in our online spaces or whatever.

1:53:30Okay, the code will come back up in a minute. I encourage you to do the thing. No, no, let's go back. We got to talk about our homies. These are the peeps that make it happen. These are the people that Okay, listen. We raised $5,500 here tonight. Venue costs about 1,500 plus some other stuff. Food and drink costs about 1,500 plus some other stuff.

1:53:52We try to pay the artists and people that are involved. It works out to about 5,000. This time we brought in 5,500. These are the people that help us get past the line. Dimmitri Sev. Dimmitri Sev. Sorry guys, I'm tired. Dimmitri Schwarzman and is a realer who's a father of many of the people in this room.

1:54:19He's got an amazing family and a lot of them are showing up here tonight. Ron and Alon Seag are two brothers that run a really cool law firm. They give us 500 bucks a month to keep the doors open. Rival, you've seen what they done. They dropped 10,000 on our community this year. They're dropping at least 20,000 on our community next year. The upgrade, that's Peter and I. We're just trying to get people like upgraded and upskilled along the way. And Peter is open to 30% off. Thank you, brother. VHT, thanks guys for buying like the 10 pack right out the gate of tickets or whatever to the whole BCI thing. Darren Nicholls, Dean Shev, thank you for your support.

1:54:57Mark Busy, Creative Mornings, Jessica Leang, Nook, that's a cool co-working space you get to go to if you feel like it. Lorraine Low Lucy Michael Space Center. Hey, I got a request right now that we clean up our after us. And you clean up after your neighbor, too, even if it ain't yours. Like I said, we get to hang out here and partake and no one's giving us pressure about nothing.

1:55:19So, let's leave this place better than we found it. And Phipe was right there, but had to go Meta Creation Lab. Guy's been running a creative AI lab in Suriri for almost 20 years at Seat in in Siri. Amazing partner in lots of ways. A these are our peeps. Udav, are you here?

1:55:40>> Yeah, bro. Udav has a small contract right now as my chief of staff. Also, we are going to be roommates for the fall. I just want to thank Udb for all the help you've been giving me. Gabe Zaro, you should try to hire him in the next 12 hours because I happen to know that he has an in not an like a final interview in the morning with one of the coolest companies any of you all have ever heard of with the CEO. He's a community guy available but not for very long. I would do it while you can do it.

1:56:12I did it and he said yes and so he's helping us out with community here at BCAI. Thank you, Gabe. Mama, thank you guys for coming. >> Victor has been here since month two making videos, laying down the archives, the permanent record. Everyone, Antonia, maybe now's the time. >> Oh, okay. >> Yeah, actually, Matthew Schwartzman, maybe now's the time for you, too. We got some special interest groups. We got things springing up all around us. That's why we built the whole nonprofit. And so I want to just invite Matthew and Antonia for the moment. Riv, thank you for coming too. They got they're both doing these AI and education Siri AI. Keep it brief y'all.

1:56:57>> What I got 30 minutes or like 30 seconds? >> If you mess ridiculous. Oh my god, what an awesome night. This is actually my first one, but I've just been watching this. I've been watching the chat. whoever's on that chat like I wake up there's 40 messages it's wild but as a part of that chat there was a edu a couple people wanted to come together start talking about education I'm from ethos lab I'm the executive director and what we do is we fuse science technology engineering applied art and math and culture to be able to create greater access to young people in these areas of steam and and so saw a lot of the conversation

1:57:40happening on the edu or a lot of not too much conversation happening on the edu group and we've got a 4,000 foot space in Mount Pleasant and are inviting anyone who's in the education space to come out for edu or education meetup in AI. So that is on the 11th of September. You can go to the chat. You could check that out. And then I also just want to give a quick plug. I got PJ right there in the back, one of our facilitators. We are running a weekly AI experimentation group for youth in grades 8 to grade 12.

1:58:12So if you got any high school students out there, what we heard from the kids and shout out to Prajwal. >> Yeah, this is the one pixel wizard talked at it and Praal talked about >> exactly both came met with our youth AI working group and they said AI needs to be done in community >> and PR they said you were the best speaker of >> they they were like he's the best.

1:58:30That's starting September 19th PJ is going to be our facilitator. If you got any high school students, please tell them to come. But if you're in EDU, come out. >> We rolled past ethos last night with Jos and I and got the whole We got to meet PJ. I invited him up here right now, but he'll blow your minds for 35 minutes.

1:58:45And who needs that at this moment? Thank you for coming doing this. Thanks for mixing it up with us around like the AI and education stuff. >> Yeah. from like how our kids should what they should do after high school to like what role AI should play in the classroom to it's confusing and some of the best teachers are experimenting and stuff like that but a lot of people aren't they're fighting against it.

1:59:07They're burying their heads in the sand. >> Yeah. There's a lot of shame around it especially within the black community as well too. It's very difficult to engage in this in space in a safe and transparent way. And so what we know is that kids while it's like they feel like it's cheating in school, they're experimenting and trying things on their own and alone. And there's a lot of different types of platforms out there that they should really be able to have critical conversations, talk about decision-m and decision hierarchy, what kind of tools to be using in open community. And so that's what we do at Ethos Lab. Yeah.

1:59:37>> And we also like to have lots of snacks. And >> you guys are awesome. I This is one of the coolest projects going on in Vancouver right now. Thank you, Anthony. Awesome. >> Speaking of cheating in school, we got Matthew Schwartzman up next. >> Kid put me on his podcast when he was still in high school. Then we started doing AI stuff together. Then I cheated.

1:59:56>> Then he t told me how he took my techniques and corrupted them and used them to cheat. >> But you've heard that story. You can check it out on the podcast. So just give us a little hype about Siri and tell us what's up. What's up, Riv? Siri AI. Okay. We host monthly events It's middle Tuesday of every single month. We have 20 30 people come by. It's always a vibe. We all get to go around and talk a little bit about AI. So, it's more personal and it's we've been doing it for 7 months now. 6 months now.

2:00:27>> 7 months. Yeah. >> There you go. And it's it's always good. We maybe if somebody my age comes there, I'll teach him how to cheat. >> But no promises. This guy's ridiculous. He's in charge of the games and antics. He's This ain't fun enough. does not interact enough around here in Vancouver. Let's pick which of these five beautiful people were generated by AI. No, you guys are all wrong. And then he just laughs at us. So, RI, tell us about your gimmicks and antics, man. Okay, so I started this thing called is it AI or not? So, I give a bunch of photos and I go, can you guess which one's AI or not?

2:01:00And every month I like to mess with everyone in the room. I'm like, either I'm going to make it really easy for you or it's just a complete mind bustle. What is this? What's going on? Who is what? what's happening. And it's been an incredible experience to do this with everyone in the room every month. So, I want to offer everyone in this room this month for September 16th is our meetup actually. And I want to give everyone 40% off in this room with the code van AI.

2:01:25>> Listen, Maurice is there. Yes, >> Dean is there. Se is there. Michelle Diamond is there. It's actually It's like this but chiller. Like we're all hanging out in the living room or whatever. So, it's pretty cool. Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate it. Yeah.

2:01:44I already said my words about the space center. We can move on. Thank you, Space Center. Let's clean up after ourselves. That's the point of this slide. We just did a little bit of community announcements. Let's see if we can keep on trucking.

2:02:02>> All right, cool. And that's what you want to do that right now. All right, cool. Would you bring up the my last QR code thing again? So, this is that whole BCAI association thing I was talking about that we're all doing here that I would like for you guys to become a part of. How many are we at right now?

2:02:22>> 34. >> 34 members signed up today. First day you could sign up through the website. That's paying members that represents us having a strong voice with like politicians, funding organizations, governments and stuff. So, I welcome you guys to all come check that out. All right, Kevin. So, Mr. Pixel Wizard went deep on sigraph and he brought us back a couple of his favorite things here in his twominut Sigraph report.

2:02:50What's up, Kevin? >> All right, I'm going to try and run this a little bit to the side here because it's a little bit of a couple of things. I'm going to talk about a little bit about how Serraph is. Patrick, are you still here? >> No. That is the most Patrick answered.

2:03:07You're wearing a white shirt and you're alone. There's no escaping. Sigraph was absolutely incredible this year. Patrick, I know you're standing in the in in the coffers, but how would you say Sigraph was this year? >> It was very relaxed. >> Clearly, I don't know. For me, it was really special. It was my second sigraph that I attended and the caliber of people and the spirit and the energy of it this year was really off the charts and the local side meetups that happened. The cross meetup on the Tuesday morning at Northeastern University was so incredible. There were so many turned on people there ready to play in all avenues of the AI space and

2:03:46bringing in the international folks as well was absolutely killer. There were a couple of people that I met along the way that I really want to showcase and I hope both of them are here tonight. I know one is and I'm just going to look up the name again because I have the memory of a parrot. John Mutter, are you here?

2:04:05>> Yes. >> All right, come on up, man. John I met at Zedspace on the last afterparty and John, tell us 10 seconds about yourself and we wanted to showcase something that you've put together. >> Sure. My name is John. I'm a visual effects compositor, director, photographer, and this is something I was just doing some experiments with generative AI. So about four weeks ago, I just started to check in to see where we were. This is a short fake home shopping network video. I've been making a number of videos just to get the name of one of my websites into some content.

2:04:42And so this is one of them. Stills made in stable diffusion automatic 11-11 video in Google VO3 script human written the old way pen and pencil and text done in compositing software in Nuke. >> Okay, I am really excited about the next item we have for sale. It is a bird's got your back silver coin. Can we get a closeup on that? This is a beautiful piece. So, you can see the intricate details.

2:05:13>> Wow. All right. I think I'm going to have to get a couple of these. >> I should also mention that each coin comes with a link to the bird website, birdsgotyouback.com. It can be yours for just three easy payments of $6.99. >> Oh, I stubbed my toe.

2:05:36>> Chia bet.

2:05:43Thank you for watching. >> Thank you so much, John. That was awesome. Do we have one a twominut piece that we can do? Okay, Ahmed, if you could come on up, please. >> Ahmed hit the floor in a gorilla fashion and it was so cool. I was literally sitting and chatting with someone and you were doing a demo with someone else in the lunch area and I was hearing a little bit about what you're up to and it was it blew my mind and then you pulled me in and showed me afterwards and I was like, "Dude, this is amazing."

2:06:16So, do you want to just go right into it? >> All right, let's do this. >> Okay, can we kill the stage lights?

2:06:31Okay, so my name is Ahmed and I have 20 years of experience in the game development industry having worked at startups as well as an engineering manager at AWS and an instructor at VFS. My work have been featured consistently on BBC, CNBC, IGN and many others. My start was with Prince back in 1989. I wanted to make cinematic action adventure games a reality. I tried every tool that I could get my hands on. None of them allowed me to do an end toend approach so that I can make a game and publish it at the same time. So I decided to build one. Creative is a no code platform that allows anyone to develop and publish commercial quality

2:07:12games on multiple platforms. Let's take a look at a sneak peek at Creative. You can build and discover different experiences. So basically everything you're about to see right now has been made using creative. You can make infinite procedural open worlds filled with vegetation with water effects that are simulated accounting for both the large scale as well as the small scale details and with different weather environments both covering this world and beyond. You can use all of that through a simple, easy to use user interface to control all aspects of the scene, populate it with content coming from different theme packs, and basically add characters that will be interacting with this environment with rigid bodies, cloth

2:07:56animations, rope physics, and even destruction. So, the most complex issues in computer graphics today, we're solving with a single click. But it's not only games, it's also interactive applications, storytelling with offline animations, and interactive walkthroughs that could be guided with AI. Speaking of AI, there is Gen AI. Of course, they don't let you into CG graph if you don't have one. And you can also, we are on a path to allow diving. So you can describe a scene and see it come alive in front of you. When you're done, you can publish to any of these platforms with a single click. If you're interested, please join creative at the weight list and some more information

2:08:36coming on release and the actual release is coming this October. Talk to me if you're interested or if you know somebody who is interested. Thank you, Kevin and Chris. Thank you.

2:08:51>> All right. >> Thank you, sir. That was amazing. If you want to have a chat with him, please connect with him. He'll show you in depth. It's really amazing in real time. Sigraph was a real blast. It's a real sort of change in the industry at the moment from gaming and 3D as we knew it and working in co-pilot with AI tools and we really saw that this year and in that spirit we're starting a film component of the Van AI meetups hopefully starting in September. We've got the WhatsApp group going right now.

2:09:20So if you're interested in that part of it, stay tuned on that one. So thank you very much all. [Applause] That's a wrap. >> Thank you for coming. September 24th, next event. There's a bunch of cool going on between now and then. The bar is still open for 45 minutes. I think there's still a bunch of Gab Jaman.

2:09:50Today's Lord Ganisha's birthday. Bob told me, "Let's get some vegetarian food and celebrate. There's a bunch of yummy stuff left. Thank you again very much for coming. Hug my mom before you go if you need a hug. >> Who says AI says innovation? Who says data says training? Training power. Who says power says wants?