This Petition is beginning to get media coverage!
Yesterday, Live Wire Calgary published an article, "Local creatives criticize Calgary Public Library’s AI artist-in-residence program," to the active outcry over this AI 'Arts' Residency. After two days and 1500+ signatures, this protest has incredible momentum. Imagine a concert hall full of people eager for the Calgary Library's Programming Department to demonstrate that they understand the harms AI poses, and are able to justify a social good that promoting AI technology provides that somehow offsets the damage it inflicts.
EVENT NOTE: There is an Anti-AI protest at Calgary City Hall scheduled for March 23 @ 2-5 PM.
(I'm not affiliated with this but am sharing for the obvious overlap in interests)
The goal of Artificial Intelligence is explicitly to automate intellectual labour forces in the same way that factories replaced artisans; this time, technology promises to replace creative labour. In a recent interview, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, argued that the energy and environmental cost of training an AI model is more economically viable than training people. “People," Altman says, "talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model, but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.” If the value of AI technology is based on a strictly economic metric, whether human or synthetic "intelligence" is cheaper, then the adoption of AI signals a willing disregard for the value of life itself - of empathy, connection, community, and creativity.
There is no understating what a betrayal it is for the Calgary Library system to whole-throatedly embrace Artificial Intelligence as a creative tool, swamping their children's section with AI-generated picture book pages and even picture books produced with dubious human involvement. It is a slap in the face to every single author, illustrator, historian, artist, translator, and contributor that visits their spaces or grace their shelves. As authors fight for their livelihoods against AI displacement, the Calgary Library wanly embraces the technology decimating the very reason libraries ever existed.
READING LIST:
Youtube Video: Brief Overview of How AI Steals from Artists (10 minutes)
Youtube Video: Anti-AI Tech Panel Lightbox Expo 2026 (1 hour)
...And for those of you who LOVE a good Excel Doc, I am sharing one of the most extensive publicly-available compilations of AI-related news - over 54 pages of news articles sorted by topic. This document was made available by Associate Professor of Technology Ethics at the University of Colorado, Casey Fiesler.
To continue protesting AI, download Nightshade and poison every image you share online. It imperceptibly corrupts the metadata and confuses AI systems about what it thinks it sees.
Link to Download Glaze and Nightshade, University of Chicago
Thanks for reading and I hope these posts are helpful as we find vocabulary to argue against mass adoption of unethical AI, especially by ostensibly humanist institutions.
Cheers,
Jordan Wieben