Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 05/27
Building the AI Commons is about the tools, archives, models, stories, standards, and institutions that still belong to everybody.
It is about keeping knowledge open without letting culture get strip-mined. It is about creative AI that has taste, consent, and fingerprints. It is about public memory. It is about refusing a future where five companies own the interface to reality.
Andrea Mills joins us from Internet Archive Canada to talk about preserving the open web and building public knowledge infrastructure in the AI age.
Dr. Rachel Horst brings the artist-builder lens: transparent creative systems, anti-slop workflows, and what happens when AI becomes a material instead of a replacement.
Kris Krüg makes the civic case: Canada needs a federally funded West Coast Centre for Ethical and Creative AI.
Bring your open-source brain, your artist heart, your civic spine, your messy questions, and your suspicious little eyebrow.
THE LINEUP
Andrea Mills, Internet Archive Canada
Preserving the Open Internet
Andrea is the Executive Director of Internet Archive Canada, 20 years in and still quietly doing some of the most important infrastructure work in the country. While everyone else is locking knowledge behind paywalls, Andrea and the team are archiving the open internet, digitizing collections, and building public AI infrastructure with datasets that actually belong to the public.
Earlier this year, Brewster Kahle and Andrea announced the BC Data Center is live and ready for scale — building data mining hubs for public AI, climate models, and large language models for small languages. This is what open source looks like at the institutional level.
Dr. Rachel Horst, UBC Master of Educational Technology
Building an Anti-Slop Fiction Machine:
What AI Reveals About Creative Processing
Dr. Horst on her AI Fiction Machine: an 8-agent system she built for Hyperstition's AI fiction contest, which generates fully automated short fiction at about $30 a story.
The system slows AI down, forces it to review its own work, and embraces what LLMs do uniquely well instead of imitating human writing.
She will walk through the architecture, the creative philosophy behind it, and what it taught her about authorship, voice, and where the human actually lives in an automated pipeline.
Rachel Horst is a futures-focused educator and researcher, working at the intersection of creative AI, writing, and hyperstition, the idea that fictions can become reality through collective belief. She was selected as a finalist in Hyperstition's AI fiction contest, where she built an 8-agent system that writes short stories end-to-end. Her work treats AI as a creative amplifier rather than a shortcut, and asks what new authorship looks like when the craft moves from the sentence to the system.
Kris Krüg, BC + AI Ecosystem Association
Canadian Center for Ethical and Creative AI
Ethics and creativity are not two separate conversations. They are both culture. The programmers and geeks build the tools. The artists and cultural workers figure out what to do with them and what they mean.
That has always been the deal, and it is the deal again now. In this talk, Kris Krüg makes the case for a federally funded Canadian Center for Ethical and Creative AI: a public home for the artists, technologists, ethicists, and communities doing the actual cultural work of this moment.
Not a lab. Not a panel. An institution with a mandate, a budget, and a long memory. Canada has the talent, the values, and the opening. What we are missing is the building.
Kris Krüg is a Vancouver-based creative technologist and community builder working at the intersection of AI, ethics, and the creative industries.
He leads the BC + AI Ecosystem Association, a nonprofit AI community of around three hundred members across the province, and runs the AI Ethical Futures Lab, a working group on responsible AI deployment.
He teaches AI to PR and communications professionals, creative practitioners, and ethics teams, and partners with organizations across film, media, and the public sector on how to use these tools without losing what matters.
THE FLOW
Doors at 6:00. Program starts at 7:00. Everybody out by 10:00. Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.
Other Upcoming Events in Our Community
Plug into the bigger organism
This meetup is part of the BC + AI Ecosystem Association a member-driven nonprofit where meetups turn into working groups, prototypes turn into shared tools, and community values turn into governance.
Join / support: https://bc-ai.ca/membership
🖤❤️✊
Kris Krüg & the Vancouver AI Community
THE SPONSORS
Big love to the organizations helping keep Vancouver AI alive, useful, and weird in the best way.
Sponsors: Intellomx, Rival Technologies, Internet Archive Canada, and TheUpgrade.ai.
Community partners: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, SFU Metacreation Lab, CreativeMornings Vancouver, Ethos Lab, Data for Good Vancouver, Cloud Commons Canada, FriendsQuarters, Global AI Summit Vancouver, and TruNorth AI Expo.
Sponsorship keeps the doors open.
Partnership keeps the work rooted in real community.
Support the ecosystem: https://bc-ai.ca/sponsors/
Partner with us: https://bc-ai.ca/about/partners/
About Vancouver AI
Vancouver AI is a neural network of curious humans mapping the terrain between technology and consciousness. We bridge art galleries and research labs, corporate towers and garage workshops because the future doesn’t get built in one kind of room.
We run monthly gatherings where builders, researchers, artists, educators, founders, and students trade demos, tools, ethics, and hard questions. No gatekeeping. No outside agenda. Just a self-organizing community that gives a damn about where this revolution goes and who gets to steer.
About BC + AI Ecosystem Association
BC + AI is the province-wide layer: a community-driven, nonprofit industry association built to create public-interest infrastructure for AI in British Columbia.
Not a corporate lobby. Not a think tank. A commons where meetups turn into working groups, prototypes turn into shared tools, and community values turn into governance.
Vancouver AI was just the start. The ecosystem keeps growing across BC... Surrey, Victoria, Kelowna, and beyond... each node bringing its own culture, needs, and experiments.
Join / support: https://bc-ai.ca/membership/