PARIS – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is in Paris today, where he’s scheduled to take part in events leading up to the global summit on artificial intelligence that begins Monday.
He’s set to participate in a roundtable discussion on AI hosted by Canada’s ambassador to France and attend a reception with members of the AI community, before ending the day at a private dinner with the French president.
Experts say the AI Action Summit is a chance to demonstrate Canada’s strength when it comes to artificial intelligence.
Florian Martin-Bariteau, research chair in technology and society at the University of Ottawa, said “it’s important to position Canada and to remind people that Canada has something to say.”
Martin-Bariteau said Canada has been a leader in AI governance, citing the 2017 Montreal declaration on responsible AI.
In 2020, Canada and France also jointly launched the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, which is now being integrated with the OECD. At the time, the Canadian government described it as an international collaboration involving “projects focused on ensuring AI is human-centred by design and fostering public trust in its use.”
Trudeau is scheduled to speak at a closing ceremony of an informal ministerial meeting related to that partnership Sunday.
Both initiatives predate the emergence of widely-available generative AI that has invigorated the conversation around AI safety and regulation in the past few years.
Since the launch of ChatGPT brought the issue into the forefront, there have been two international meetings, largely focused on AI safety and risk. The first took place at Bletchley Park in the U.K. in 2023, and the second in Soeul, South Korea, in 2024.
The two-day summit in Paris will have a broader focus, looking at questions including AI and the public interest, the future of work, innovation and culture.
The Paris meeting will be co-chaired by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron, while U.S. Vice President JD Vance and China’s Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang are also expected to attend.
France says nearly 100 heads of state and government and almost 1,000 civil society stakeholders from about 100 countries are expected to take part.
Rowan Wilkinson, a research analyst for the digital society program at Chatham House in the U.K., said Trudeau’s attendance demonstrates and supports current Canadian policy efforts and said the country’s “academic excellence on this topic also needs to be embraced.”
“The summit is an opportunity for Trudeau to signal his commitment to this transformative technology and Canada’s role on the global stage,” she said.
But while Canada’s research strength in AI has been widely recognized, critics have taken issue with some aspects of the country’s AI efforts, including that it has been slow to commercialize the technology.
And while the Liberal government has lauded its AI regulation bill, some said the government was too slow to get it through Parliament, and the bill now looks likely to die on the order paper ahead of an anticipated spring election.
Martin-Bariteau said heads of state could issue a joint statement at the summit, and that countries tend to follow up such statements at the national level.
He said the joint statement on AI safety issued at the first meeting in Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom was one of the successes of that 2023 summit, and most of the countries who signed on are now “building capacity at the national level.”
The countries represented at that meeting also asked Yoshua Bengio, one of the Canadian “godfathers” of AI, to lead efforts to put together an international report on AI safety. The report, which incorporates input from 96 AI experts from around the world, was focused on general-purpose AI and was released in late January.
It says some of AI’s potential harms are well-known, including the use of technology for scams, non-consensual intimate images, child sexual abuse material, the risk of bias in system outputs and privacy violations.
It says as general-purpose AI gains more capabilities, more risks are emerging, including “large-scale labour market impacts, AI-enabled hacking or biological attacks, and society losing control over general-purpose AI.”
Wilkinson said Bengio’s report is “a timely, comprehensive reminder of the risks and capabilities of general-purpose AI systems and will likely be a conversation-starter over the summit.”
At the 2024 AI summit in Seoul, world leaders agreed to build a network of publicly backed safety institutes to advance research and testing of the technology. Canada announced the launch of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute in November.
Nicolas Papernot, co-director of the institute’s research program, said its work will be grounded in Bengio’s report as it pursues questions about bias, the robustness of AI systems and their predictions and the potential for privacy breaches.
Papernot said the Canadian institute is “in touch with a lot of these parallel institutes. The idea is essentially to have a shared agenda for research.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 9, 2024.
