The Canadian Media Guild is following closely the newly unveiled national strategy on Artificial Intelligence (AI).
 
The full announcement by the Government of Canada was just released and we will take some time to review it fully before responding to specifics.

We will continue advocating strongly that AI should not replace human workers. We have concerns over the use of generative AI in journalism as it diminishes and erodes trust in the work of our members from coast to coast to coast. 
Artificial intelligence can be used as an assistive technology, but humans should oversee all decision-making processes. There are public concerns about energy and water usages from data centres. There are ongoing questions about where some of these large language models have trained their data with little transparency.

We call on the Government of Canada to work with the media industry to make sure any strategy is people centred. We will push for creative workers to get compensated for their work and have options to opt out of training AI models.
We encourage the government to protect Canadian workers through existing copyright laws and continue to fight for Canadian data sovereignty. 

The Canadian Media Guild will be following the advance of AI strategies and will continue to strongly advocate on behalf of our members.

In solidarity,

Jane Robertson
President,
Canadian Media Guild