Industry committee  I think your questioning also points out the challenge of trying to have such broad, sweeping, horizontal legislation, because it's very difficult to try to capture all of these very specific use cases in one piece of legislation. In a lot of cases, it actually might make more sense, for example, to direct Health Canada to look specifically at how to navigate complex use cases that are occurring in the health care industry, or directing the financial services regulator to deal more with those use cases.

Industry committee  I echo the comments of the panel, but I hope the committee is going to have the opportunity to hear from Canadian companies that deploy AI where AI is not their core business but is deployed in their business. This is to understand the impact that these kinds of regimes are going to have on the agriculture industry, financial services industry, manufacturing industry and energy industry.

Industry committee  I think the concerns with the digital services tax are more about the timing, with Canada moving forward out of step with other jurisdictions. There are fewer concerns about the tax specifically. It's more the timing and alignment with other countries.

Industry committee  I have a household full of Swifties. We talk about this at the dinner table. I think you've raised a great example, actually, of where existing legislation could be more purpose-built to solve a problem like that. It is already illegal to share intimate images without consent.

Industry committee  I'm not aware of the particulars of that case. I'm also here on behalf of Amazon Web Services as opposed to Amazon, so it's more difficult for me to answer.

Industry committee  My expertise is in AI for Amazon Web Services as opposed to Amazon. I don't have that expertise.

Industry committee  It's perfectly legitimate for legislators to have a different view of high- versus low-impact AI. I think the point of the discussion is to try to make sure that the finite resources Canadian companies have are not used unnecessarily to do really complex assessments where they may not be necessary.

Industry committee  It's actually not effective. It's not that it's too complex; it isn't necessarily going to be an effective way to evaluate whether a system operates appropriately for that use case. What we do for customers is provide good, clear information about recommended use cases for the models we offer to customers.

Industry committee  You can create the framework for those things now and then reference those pieces as they evolve. We're going to see a number of international standards that will probably be published in the next few months. That work is happening at a very rapid pace. Again, the technology is also evolving at a very rapid pace.

Industry committee  I think we would start with a meaningful decision that may impact an individual's human rights or health and safety. We would probably start with that as the basic definition. It is an area where I think considerable debate went on in the EU to clearly define what those exact use cases are.

Industry committee  Yes. There are a lot of use cases. A lot of times, for example, health care will be viewed as a high-impact use case, or human resources and recruiting will. If you use a video conferencing platform to conduct a job interview, you are using AI, and I would argue that that's not a high-risk use case.

Industry committee  I think we should apply the same approach to high risk versus low risk, even when we're talking about general purpose systems. The same technology you're talking about can be in a high-risk context or a low-risk context. Even visual search, for example, is using computer vision technology or facial recognition technology.

Industry committee  No, we were not consulted before the bill was tabled.

Industry committee  Further to my remarks, we did advocate that there was a need for greater clarity for developers and deployers in defining their responsibilities in the act—

Industry committee  That specific amendment was, I feel, a reflection of our comments. Regarding other specific comments, what we don't think was heard was the need to really differentiate between what's high and low impact more clearly and the need for better clarity around the criminal provisions.