AI data centres and chatbot accounts in schools are hot election topics. The Tyee asked municipal parties for their positions.
Vancouver Liberals
Party founder and mayoral candidate Kareem Allam told The Tyee he supports Canada having its own AI data centres as a matter of national security, sovereignty, health care and the economy.
“I don’t think it’s OK for Canada to be fully reliant on the Americans for AI,” Allam said. But that doesn’t mean the Vancouver Liberals would greenlight building data centres in the city.
“Why should we be using our most expensive and precious land for AI data centres?” Allam said. “Building AI data centres in Mount Pleasant, when we have a housing shortage, just defies any sense of logic or intelligence to me at all.”
The Vancouver Liberals have yet to declare any school trustee candidates. But Allam, who has sat on advisory boards at both Kwantlen Polytechnic University and the University of Victoria, believes there is a place for generative AI education in schools.
“Students are going out there and using AI, whether it’s part of the curriculum or not,” he said. When it’s not, Allam added, student outcomes decline as many use the technology to cheat or circumvent their learning.
“Where it’s integrated into the curriculum, with ethics, all the oversights that you would expect or want to see, the outcomes for students got better,” he said.
That being said, Allam would align with the position of the province and the BC Teachers’ Federation on providing students with AI chatbot accounts.
The Education Ministry does not require schools to provide chatbot accounts for students. But it has created AI ethical guidelines for districts, schools and teachers to make their own decisions.
The provincial teachers’ union has not taken an official stance on chatbot accounts, but earlier this year it released a research memo on the ethical considerations of generative AI use in education overall.
That research memo raised concerns about the potential for the de-professionalization of teaching, the privatization of resources, data privacy and electronic surveillance, and the implicit bias of AI chatbots, among other concerns.
But it also emphasized the agency of teachers to implement new technologies in their work, with ethical guidelines, strict policies and teacher education opportunities in place.