Benoît Dupont, Research Chair in the Prevention of Cybercrime and Professor of Criminology at the Université de Montréal, and Catherine Régis, professor at the Faculty of Law at Université de Montréal.The use of AI has become commonplace in contemporary society. It’s in our homes, classrooms, and businesses, but there remains a regulatory deficiency in Canada for dealing with what is widely accepted to be a burgeoning technological industry.
While specializing in different facets of artificial intelligence , both researchers emphasize the need to nuance the discussion around AI. Régis said it’s important to keep the end objective in mind when thinking about how and why AI should be developed. “The target here is the individual and people are using off the shelf AI systems or models to produce things that manipulate people or affect their reputation,” he added.
Finally, there are the risks often encapsulated on screen, where AI systems pose an existential threat to the human species. “The frequent tension in AI is the way we frame it…, you need to be able to innovate so Canadians can benefit from AI more broadly…, but then you also need to protect people from the harms that can be created from AI.”