By Fenwick McKelvey
Publication Date: 2025-11-27 17:43:00
As generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and others reshape the digital landscape, much of the discussion in Canada is focused on commercial innovation.
But what if AI were developed as a public utility rather than a commercial service? Canada’s long history with public media – particularly CBC and Radio-Canada – provides a useful model for considering how AI might serve the public, given growing calls for a public interest approach to AI policy.
Commercial AI is largely based on the assumption that user-generated content published online is available for training commercial AI. Focusing so much on the technical success of generative AI ignores that its innovations depend on access to global cultural knowledge – the result of treating the Internet as a “knowledge commons.”
AI would have been impossible without public data, and much of that data was taken without returning to the public system. Canada, in…