Hey friends,

Okay. I can finally start showing you what I meant. Last time I wrote, I called Futureproof the most honest AI conversation happening anywhere this year.

Fair enough. That is a cocky thing to say about an event that hasn’t happened yet. Here are the first three people helping me back it up…

Earlyworm passes are CA$650 through August 15 →

Brewster Kahle
Founder & Digital Librarian, Internet Archive

Brewster built the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine around a civic ambition: universal access to all knowledge. At Futureproof, he is asking what kind of library the future will need.

Meet Brewster →

Amber Case
Founder, Calm Tech Institute

Your phone is full of software fighting for your attention.

Amber helped build an entire discipline around the opposite: technology that respects human attention, agency and everyday life. Good tools should know when to get out of the way.

Meet Amber →

Ana Serrano
President & Vice-Chancellor, OCAD University

We keep talking about culture like it’s the garnish on top of technological change.

Ana co-founded DemocracyXChange, founded the CFC Media Lab and IDEABOOST, and now leads OCAD University. She has spent decades putting artists, educators and citizens inside decisions too often left to technologists.

Meet Ana →

Different work. Same stubborn question: what are the machines for, and who gets to decide?

A festival for people with receipts, doubts, tools and taste.

That isn’t the whole lineup. It’s the first proof.

These are people who built durable things before this market got frothy and who will still be doing useful work after today’s pitch decks are forgotten.

Put your ass in the room.

I can invite people worth listening to. You make it a festival by showing up.

The Earlyworm Festival Pass is CA$650 through August 15. 
On August 16, it becomes CA$950.

Your pass covers opening night, two full program days and the closing party. In between: talks, film, performances, demos, startup exhibits and hackathon finals. Registered attendees can also opt into private co-founder matchmaking, capacity permitting.

The future is still up for discussion.

See you in the room,

Kris Krüg

Founder & Curator, Futureproof Festival
Executive Director, BC + AI Ecosystem Association

P.S. For the BC people: BC + AI members get 25% off Futureproof. Join the association, use your member code, and the CA$650 Earlyworm pass drops to CA$487.50.

The discount is useful. The membership is bigger than that. BC + AI is part solarpunk R&D lab, part community potluck: a province-wide network connecting people, opportunities and the practical work of building an AI ecosystem rooted here.

JOIN BC + AI + SAVE 25% →

BC + AI Membership - Join the community

Become a member for year-round access to BC + AI rooms, people, and programs. Individual membership starts at $340 CAD / year.

bc-ai.ca/membership

Fair warning: we're growing fast over here. And yes, I know how that sounds coming from an AI guy. The calendar backs it up. This one's loaded so grab a beverage settle in and read to the bottom. - KK

Vancouver AI Meetup: Wednesday, July 29

Last month might be my favorite night we've ever done. It opened the way every Vancouver AI night opens, with a Squamish welcome, and this time I got to dance the Squamish animal dance with Anthony Joseph and Jonny Williams, two Squamish Nation councillors who hold that space for us every month. I'm still thinking about it.

AI Meetup #30 Recap Photos & Videos

The talks leaned into building AI responsibly: Anthonia Ogundele of Ethọ́s Lab connected youth innovation and community AI charters, while Mayumi Rollings of Tiny Ghost Studios brought the Film Club lens to what still makes art human. The Honourable Rick Glumac, Minister of State for AI, addressed the community directly.

bc-ai.ca/events/vancouver-ai-meetup-2026-06

The next one is Wednesday, July 29, 6pm at the Space Centre. Dave Olson joins us.

Community builder, archivist, just back from Japan, here for a night about memory, archives, and what it means to keep making human things while the machines get louder. Bring a demo, a doubt, a project in progress.

Get July AI Meetup Tickets

“The present is an unfinished poem…"

​Dave has spent decades making culture from the raw materials of lived experience: zines, dispatches, audio, field notes, friendship cards, Olympic-era media experiments, travel stories, spoken word, and handmade archives that refuse to behave like “content.”

luma.com/july-ai

The Responsible AI Professional Certificate

​Every organization is deploying AI. Most are doing it without governance frameworks, without ethics training, without asking the hard questions. ​The organizations that will lead aren't the ones with the fastest models. They're the ones with people who know how to assess risks, apply frameworks, and navigate complexity before deployment.

Responsible AI Professional Certification: 8/7

​RAP (Responsible AI Professional) is a 4-week certification program for leaders, executives, and practitioners who need to understand, implement, and govern responsible AI practices.

luma.com/rap-2026-08-07

Here’s what participants have to say about the program…

You leave with four things you'll use for years, built on your own real work: an AI inventory, an ethics assessment, a deployment checklist, an impact assessment.

Last cohort, people built a scanner that flags which skills on a team are about to get automated. An AI policy a whole agency actually follows. A checklist that stops a sketchy vendor system before it gets in the door.

Can't make those four Fridays? The same cert runs again this fall, September 18 to October 9. Same format, same four artifacts you keep. Pick the dates that fit your life.

Once a year the whole ecosystem is in one room.

Nobody planned this in a boardroom. It started as a monthly Vancouver AI Meetup that kept outgrowing its room. Then hackathons. Then a film festival. Then 30 months of people showing up because the stakes are real and the gathering is not boring. You did not attend the community into existence. You built it. This is the year it gets a stage.

Futureproof Festival 2026

October 28 to 30 at the Space Centre. Our people plus the world we keep telling about this, the same community with the volume up and better shoes.

luma.com/futureproof-festival

Earlyworm tickets are $650 through August 15 then it's $950.

There is more than one way into a room like this.

Submit a talk. Not the safe one you have given before. The one only you could give, that nobody else in that room could stand up and deliver. We want that one.

Sponsor or partner. This is how a festival like this actually gets built, and there is room for the right people. If that is you, reach out.

The best $340 you'll spend this year

BC + AI is a non-profit, and it runs on its members. For $340 a year you're not buying a discount code, you're joining the community and supporting the ecosystem.

BC + AI Ecosystem Association

A grassroots member-supported nonprofit building practical, responsible AI capacity in British Columbia.

BC + AI Ecosystem

Friday Office Hours every week. A crowd of people who actually build with this stuff not just post about it. First crack at every cohort we run before it opens to anyone else.

You read all the way to the bottom. You're my kind of person. Okay, that's the whole garage sale. Take what's yours. I'm gonna go touch some grass. <3

Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem

P.S. Our last AI Animation & Film Accelerator cohort wrapped and the films are up on our YouTube. Start with Robin's. People walk into this thing cold and walk out with a finished film, and the next accelerator runs in July and then again in September.

• July cohort starts July 27 → luma.com/Cartoon

• September cohort starts September 21 → luma.com/Scene

Hey friends,

There is a lot of noise right now.

AI as miracle. AI as monster. AI as pitch deck. AI as weather system. AI as slot machine. AI as policy memo. AI as the thing your boss discovered yesterday and now everyone has to become a wizard by Friday.

I do not think the answer is more certainty.

I think the answer is better questions.

Better conversations. Better experiments. Better gatherings where the people building the future actually have to sit beside the people who will have to live inside it.

That is what we are building with Vancouver AI and BC + AI: a place where builders and skeptics can argue productively, where artists and engineers are not treated as different species, where public interest is not an afterthought, and where nobody has to sand off their questions to participate.

Vancouver AI Meetup #30: June 24

This is a monthly hang to swap notes, demo work and argue productively about the future. Thirty months in a row. That still sounds kind of fake to me, but here we are.

luma.com/june-vanai

Next Wednesday, we're back at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre for Vancouver AI Meetup #30.

It is World Cup season in Vancouver. The city is awake. The dome is waiting. Rick Glumac, B.C.'s Minister of State for AI & New Technologies, is joining us to talk about what he's seen as research, companies, policy, and ecosystem-building start moving from theory into the marketplace.

It should be a banger, in the technical civic sense.

Also the regular sense.

If you have never been to one of our nights, this is a very good one to start with.

We also just dropped two videos from last month that capture the deeper signal.

Dr. Rachel Horst gave us an anti-slop machine: a way of thinking about AI literacy that keeps humans, learning, agency, and weirdness intact.

Andrea Mills from the Internet Archive talked about saving the open web, and why the fight for public memory is not some dusty librarian side quest. It is central to whatever comes next.

If you have ever wondered what Vancouver AI and BC + AI are actually about, watch those talks.

Curious, critical, grounded, practical, slightly feral, and allergic to bullshit.

And then come next week.

I'm also starting to properly tease Futureproof Festival.

Futureproof Festival

The most honest AI conversation happening this year. A festival, not a pile of sessions.

BC + AI Ecosystem Association

October 28-30 2026. Three days at the Space Centre for the people who still believe nuance matters.

The shape is getting clearer now.

Futureproof is an ideas festival for the people who know this moment is bigger than software.

Not just AI people talking to AI people.

Artists beside engineers. Founders beside skeptics. Educators beside toolmakers. Policy people beside weirdos. Builders beside critics. People trying to ship things beside people asking whether those things should exist.

That is where the good ideas usually hide.

The best gatherings in the world mix these worlds on purpose. Musicians do not only need more musicians. Builders do not only need more builders. AI people absolutely do not only need more AI people.

We need better conversations. We need stranger experiments.

We need a few properly alive parties where the future is not being sold to us, but argued over, tested, remixed, and made more human before it hardens around us.

The speaker submission portal is coming soon, and I want this community's fingerprints all over the program.

Bring the talk nobody else is giving

Pitch a talk, workshop, demo, performance, or strange little format for Futureproof 2026. Or tell us the one you wish someone would put on stage.

BC + AI Ecosystem Association

The guiding question is simple:

What is the talk you want to hear, or give, that you are not hearing on other stages?

What should we be talking about?
Who needs to be there?
What are the hard questions that keep getting dodged?
What do we need to understand before this future gets poured into concrete?

Next week, I'll share a few hints about the first out-of-town guests we've booked.

Block the dates now.

Futureproof is not landing from orbit. It is growing out of these conversations.

Hope to see you next week,

--
Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem

Join the non-profit → bc-ai.ca/membership/
Multi-modal. Multi-cultural. Radically local. Future-facing.

The AI conversation out there is exhausting.

Hype people selling you the dream. Doomers selling you the nightmare. A whole lot of very confident people acting like they know exactly where this is going…

Futureproof is my attempt to build something more honest.

Futureproof Festival 2026

Futureproof brings artists, engineers, researchers, founders, educators, skeptics, and builders into the same festival: opening night, two program days, film, demos, live performance, and the kind of conversation AI deserves.

luma.com/futureproof-festival

It’s been years in the making. Meetups, hackathons, film screenings, ethics arguments, half-finished robots, late-night convos and a bunch of people refusing to let the AI story get written only by vendors, doomers and LinkedIn heroes.

On October 28-30, 2026, it lands in Vancouver. Three days at HR MacMillan Space Centre, a planetarium on the water in Vanier Park.

Dates are locked. Venue is locked. Tickets are live. A few brave souls have already bought theirs. This is year one. It will still have fingerprints all over it. That’s the good part.

You don’t need a polished take on AI to belong here. Come excited. Come skeptical. Come with questions. Come argue about the future in person. Just come.

Earlyworm is open now. First-year passes are $650 CAD until August 15. (Yes Canadian dollars…. for a lotta ya the exchange rate is greatly in yer favor!)

Details → https://futureproof.website/
Grab a pass → https://luma.com/futureproof-festival

Put it on the calendar and start looking at flights.

See you under the dome,

Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem

Join the non-profit → bc-ai.ca/membership/
Multi-modal. Multi-cultural. Radically local. Future-facing.

LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram

P.S. The crew behind this is BC + AI, the ethical AI nonprofit I’ve been building. Almost three years of monthly meetups, a film festival, hackathon nights, life sciences and education crews publishing actual research, and a consciousness salon that gets weirder every month. Futureproof is that whole scene throwing its doors open for three days.

Thirty months in a row.

That still sounds kind of fake to me, but here we are.

Vancouver AI is back at H.R. MacMillan Space Centre on Wednesday, June 24, 2026. This is the monthly room for builders, artists, researchers, students, public servants, founders, skeptics, educators, the AI-curious, and the beautifully confused.

We started this thing in a room full of people trying to figure out what was happening with AI. People who were excited, people who were worried, people who were both.

Mostly both.

You can build with AI and still care about artists, water, power, kids, consent, Indigenous data sovereignty, public memory, and who gets paid. You can be curious without joining the cult.

That is the Vancouver AI lane. Both hands full.

Vancouver AI: Wednesday June 24

​Thirty months in: ceremony, demos, robots, responsible AI, and community under the Space Centre dome.

luma.com/june-vanai

Date: Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Time: Doors at 6:00 PM, program at 7:00 PM, everybody out by 10:00 PM
Place: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver
RSVP: luma.com/june-vanai

Builders in the lobby. Community vibes. Weird demos. Robots if they behave. Robots if they do not. People showing the things they are actually making.

FFeatured Conversation: From Research To The Marketplace Without Losing The Plot

Honourable Rick Glumac
Minister of State for AI and New Technologies

Rick Glumac brings a tech-sector and computer engineering background to government, with experience across animation, video games, mobile apps, and public technology policy.

He’ll speak about what he has witnessed over the past year as B.C.’s Minister of State for AI and New Technologies: research moving toward market-ready companies, responsible AI, and how to grow the ecosystem without losing the plot.

He has worked across animation, video games, mobile apps, and public technology policy, and will speak about B.C. research moving toward market-ready companies, responsible AI, and how to grow the ecosystem without losing the plot.

Opening Ceremony: Grounding The Room

Anthony Joseph and Jonny Williams: Squamish Nation

Anthony Joseph and Jonny Williams bring the opening grounding for Meetup #30, centering local relationship and respect for where we gather before the room accelerates into demos, policy, and future-talk.

Youth Power, Creative Production, And Community Care

Anthonia Ogundele: Ethos Lab / Blackathon

Community AI Charters, Youth Power, And The Blackathon - Anthonia Ogundele is the founder of Ethos Lab, a STEAM innovation hub serving youth in K-12 education

Her work sits at the overlap of educational technology, equity, community values, and young people becoming creators and decision-makers, not just users of tools designed somewhere else.

Mayumi Rollings: Tiny Ghost Studios

Creative Production, AI Animation, And The New Studio Layer: Mayumi Rollings is a Tiny Ghost Studios founder and Chief Executive Officer, bringing operational finance, people-first leadership, and creative studio infrastructure into the AI animation and production conversation.

The Story So Far

January was Alexandra Samuel and Viv, Maya Bruck keeping vibe coders honest, and Erica Lapadat-Janzen naming the soft violence hiding inside so-called ethics discourse.

February was MAC night, where we let the consciousness people take the wheel and asked what love, embodiment, synthetic empathy, and "real" even mean when language gets cheap.

March was Both Hands Full. AI is extractive, biased, thirsty, dangerous, powerful, useful, weird, and making a lot of us more creative than ever. All true.

April was ethics with teeth: care, fairness, scams, governance, street-level wisdom, and what happens when we stop pretending productivity is the only thing worth measuring.

May was the AI commons: Internet Archive Canada, Rachel Horst's anti-slop machine, Gabriel George opening the room, public memory, creative systems with fingerprints, and the reminder that the commons does not build itself.

June is the checkpoint.

No aggressive pitching. No AI worship service. No doom panel cosplay. No gatekeeping.

Just real people trying to keep their ethics, creativity, humour, and agency intact while the machines get louder.

If you are building, come.

If you are skeptical, come.

If you are confused, perfect.

If you have got a robot, absolutely bring the robot.

Get Involved

BC + AI is the province-wide layer: a community-driven, nonprofit industry association built to create public-interest infrastructure for AI in British Columbia.

Join or support the ecosystem through BC + AI membership.

See you at the Space Centre,

Kris Krug & the Vancouver AI Community

P.S. Futureproof Festival is becoming real. Dates are locked. Venue is locked. The first international speakers have said yes. Earlyworm tickets are on sale now, and the first brave weirdos have already bought in.

It is no longer a theory, a sketch, or a sleep-deprived group chat hallucination. It is fucking happening. More soon, but if Vancouver AI is the monthly campfire, Futureproof is our signal flare to the world!

Futureproof Festival 2026 · Luma

AI is reshaping culture, work, education, creativity, governance, and everyday life. Futureproof exists to create a more honest public conversation, one that leaves room for skepticism, possibility, disagreement, and curiosity.

luma.com/futureproof-festival

Hey friends,

AI is already part of life in the Valley.

It’s showing up in classrooms, studios, small businesses, hiring, health care, local government, creative work, family conversations, and the daily decisions people are trying to make with incomplete information.

So this Thursday, we’re getting people in a room to talk about it clearly.

CV + AI Community Meetup

AI is showing up in schools, studios, small businesses, local government, health care, creative work, and everyday conversations across the Valley. ​

Some people are building with it.

Some are worried about it.

Most of us are somewhere in between. ​

Comox Valley AI is a place to bring all of that into the same room.

luma.com/comox-valley

Craig Whitton from North Island College / Authentic Consulting is coming back to talk about AI and education beyond the lazy “is it cheating?” loop.

Mel DiPietro from FlocknFir is bringing the human side: teams, wellbeing, judgment, uncertainty, and how people make decent decisions while the tools keep changing.

Colin Fitzgerald from Tree AI is bringing the practical side: what happens after the demo, when AI has to be useful in the real world with real people counting on it.

No sales pitch. No doom theatre. No fake certainty.

Just locals trying to understand what’s changing, what’s useful, what’s risky, and what we want to build here.

Thursday, June 4
6:00 to 8:00 PM
Filberg Centre, Courtenay

Free for BC + AI members. $20 otherwise.

And honestly, if you’re planning to come to a few of these, membership is the move. It helps us keep building spaces like this across BC: local meetups, practical workshops, better public conversations, and an AI community that isn’t owned by vendors, hype cycles, or whoever has the loudest LinkedIn account.

Come if you’re curious, skeptical, building with it, avoiding it, worried about it, or just ready to have the conversation without anyone trying to sell you the future.

See you there,

Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem

Join the non-profit → bc-ai.ca/membership/
Multi-modal. Multi-cultural. Radically local. Future-facing.

LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram

The uncomfortable thing about responsible AI is that nobody gets to stand outside the contradiction.

We use the tools.
We critique the tools.
We benefit from them.
We are harmed by them.

And then, somehow, we are still asked to help organizations deploy them responsibly. This Responsible AI Professional Certification was built for the people standing in that room.

Responsible AI Professional Certification

Lead with ethics in an AI-first world. 90-minute live Zoom each week. Self-directed reading and exercises between sessions. Total commitment: 12–16 hours over 4 weeks.

luma.com/ai-ethics

RAP is a 4-week Responsible AI Professional certification for people who need to make judgment operational: in meetings, procurement decisions, product reviews, nonprofit programs, governance policies, and the quiet moment before someone says, “Can we just ship it?”

Over four live Friday sessions, we work through:

• how AI systems work, and why confident outputs still need verification

• bias, privacy, ownership, and fairness tradeoffs

• deployment readiness, stakeholder impact, labor, and carbon cost

• synthetic media, human agency, Indigenous data sovereignty, and trust

The frameworks matter: UNESCO, OECD, NIST, IEEE, GDPR, CCPA, CARE, OCAP.

But the practice matters more.

You leave with working artifacts you can use in your actual context: a Personal AI Inventory, Ethics Assessment, Deployment Readiness Report, Capstone Governance Document, and RAP certification.

Cohort 1 starts this Friday, May 22 at 3:00 PM PT.

Responsible AI Professional Certification

A four-week certification for leaders, executives, and practitioners governing AI in their organizations.

luma.com/ai-ethics

Register here: https://luma.com/ai-ethics

BC + AI members pay $750. Standard is $1,500. If you are not a member yet, join BC + AI first for $340 and save $750 on RAP. That is $410 back in your pocket and a community around you while you do the work.

Responsible AI isn’t purity it’s a practice.

Hope to see you Friday,

Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director

BC + AI Ecosystem
Multi-modal. Multi-cultural. Radically local. Future-facing.
LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram

A week from yesterday, we start our 2nd AI Animation & Film Accelerator.​ Three Monday evenings (May 25, Jun 1 & 8), with 10-16 hours of guided production work between sessions.

AI Animation & Filmmaking Accelerator

BC + AI Ecosystem presents our 2nd AI Animation & Filmmaking Accelerator where you'll build a complete animated short using the AI-powered production pipeline…

luma.com/toons

Us: We are building a tight cohort of animators, filmmakers, and makers who want to ship. We will give you structure, deadlines, feedback loops, and practical AI workflows that speed up pre production without flattening your voice.

You: You bring a story, a character, a mood, a world. It can be messy. It can be early. If you have taste and intent, you are ready.

In the program, you will use AI for the parts that usually slow projects down:

• rapid ideation without losing your original premise

• script beats, shot lists, and animatics support

• style exploration and reference building

• production planning so you actually finish

Start date: Monday, May 25

Join here: https://luma.com/toons

What You'll Build

One complete 30-40 second animated short from a client brief. Your vision. Portfolio-ready.

• Session 1 (May 25): Storytelling and Animatic

• Session 2 (June 1): Animation and Editing

• Session 3 (June 8): Studio style feedback and Professional review

• Between sessions: 10-16 hours of independent production work

• Session recordings for reference​

We wanted to figure out what it actually looks like to work alongside AI as a creative - not in theory, but in practice. What we’ve created is a real workflow that we use on paying client work, and has led us to our own greenlit original IP Blood and Glitter, which has been called "the strongest AI IP from anybody working in this space right now."

Bring your taste, your curiosity, and your unfinished work. That is the raw material. Luke and Mayumi of Tiny Ghost Studios bring the workflow, the feedback, and a path to the AI Film Club screening on June 11 in front of ~200 industry people.

If you have been side eyeing AI tools but still feel the pull, this is a good place to engage.

We treat AI like a creative collaborator and a production amplifier, with clear authorship, intention, and taste leading the work.

We start Monday, May 25.

Join us: https://luma.com/toons

AI Animation & Filmmaking Accelerator

We've spent the last 2 years exploring the space in between... where AI isn't a replacement for creativity, and it isn't a cheap shortcut either. If used correctly, it's a tool that can flip animation production from the traditional ratio of 80% grind and 20% creative input, right around.

luma.com/toons

Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem

Join the non-profit → bc-ai.ca/membership/

Multi-modal. Multi-cultural. Radically local. Future-facing.
LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram

I built the AI ethics certification I kept wishing existed. Cohort 1 starts a week from today and I want you in it!

It's called RAP. Responsible AI Professional. Four weeks, four live 90-minute Zoom sessions, plus a few hours of async work a week. It's capstone-based and competency-based: weekly quizzes you have to pass, four artifacts you build and keep, an Ethics Impact Assessment that ties them together. If you've scoped a DPIA, you know the shape of it.

Responsible AI Professional Certification · Zoom · Luma

Lead with ethics in an AI-first world. ⚠️ Limited to 30 participants

luma.com/ai-ethics

I didn't build it alone. Martin Lopatka built the curriculum and the assessment model. Forensic statistics PhD, master's in AI, shipped and debugged real ML in production at Mozilla.

Sarah Downey teaches the governance and human-factors sessions. Twenty-plus years in nonprofit and social-impact leadership, now advising mission-driven organizations on AI governance. I run the room.

We teach against the real frameworks: UNESCO, OECD, NIST, IEEE. Week 2 is the one your world lives in: bias named precisely (racism, sexism, classism, not the sanitized word that gives companies cover), privacy, consent, and a tool that runs a data practice against GDPR, CCPA, CARE, and OCAP side by side.

The reading list is short and every item is a primary source, not a summary of a summary. Finish the course and you build a custom GPT trained on your own coursework, a practice partner that knows your knowledge base.

Thirty seats. Twenty-two are spoken for. The last eight are the founding cohort: a smaller room, direct access to all three of us. Register at https://lu.ma/ai-ethics. For the member rate, join at bc-ai.ca first, then register with that email.

Questions? Reply straight to this email. It comes to me.

We spent three months developing this because the people who do this work for a living are the ones who should be shaping it!

Technology isn't neutral and neither are we. Come build something with us.

Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem

Join the non-profit → bc-ai.ca/membership/
Multi-modal. Multi-cultural. Radically local. Future-facing.

Hey friends,

A quick invite for folks in the Comox Valley.

Our next AI Community Meetup is happening Wednesday, May 6 at the Florence Filberg Centre in Courtenay.

CV + AI Community Meetup #1

No sales pitches. No performative hype. No pretending any of us have it all figured out.

luma.com/courtenay

AI is reshaping work, creativity, education, and public life fast, and most of us are processing it alone in browser tabs. This meetup is the opposite of that. It’s a local, in person room where we can be honest about what’s useful, what’s risky, and what’s changing under our feet.

Meetup details

Date: Wednesday, May 6
Time: 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm
Location: Florence Filberg Centre, 411 Anderton Ave, Courtenay
Tickets: $20 standard, free for BC + AI Ecosystem Association Members

RSVP: https://luma.com/comox

A couple short talks, then conversation

Quanah Parker on data sovereignty and local AI, and why running models closer to home matters. Practical tradeoffs, privacy, cost, reliability, and what it means to build on infrastructure you actually own.

Steve Jones with a short talk called All Juice, No Pulp about skipping the addictive chatbot wrapper and using AI tools like Claude Code or Codex to build personal, custom software that does what you want. Plus a quick demo of two open source projects.

Comox Valley AI is a regional chapter of BC + AI, a registered Canadian nonprofit building community-driven AI spaces across British Columbia. Lourdes Gant and I are co-hosting this one.

Also, huge gratitude to the folks helping us make the night work, including Colin Fitzgerald and Anyssa at Natural Pastures, who have been leaning in as early supporters.

If you know someone in Courtenay, Comox, Cumberland, or Hornby who should be in this conversation, forward this.

See you Wednesday,

Kris Krüg
kk@bc-ai.ca

BC + AI Ecosystem Association
https://bc-ai.ca

P.S. If you’ve been orbiting the community, membership is how this stays alive. It funds the rooms, the experiments, and the humans doing the work. Members also get free tickets to events like this. Join here: https://bc-ai.ca/membership/

P.P.S. Responsible AI Professional (RAP) Certification launches May 22. Four weeks, real frameworks, real scenarios, built for people making real decisions. Info: https://luma.com/ai-ethics

Responsible AI Professional Certification

Lead with ethics in an AI-first world.

luma.com/ai-ethics

P.P.P.S. Web Summit week is coming fast, and we have three Vancouver side events lined up. The clean hub is here: https://luma.com/vancouver-ai

BC + AI Events Calendar

The heartbeat of BC’s AI community: Vancouver AI gatherings and every people-powered breakthrough across the province.

Multi-modal, multi-cultural, radically local, and future-facing.

luma.com/vancouver-ai

Most AI ethics talk sounds like someone duct-taped a values statement to a procurement form and called it leadership. This Wednesday, we’re doing something better.

The AI Ethical Futures Lab is taking over Vancouver AI at the Space Centre, and we’re getting into the real stuff: fairness, care, governance, moral imagination & power. Grab your seat: https://luma.com/vanai-april

Join us Wednesday night for Vancouver AI Community Meetup!

Vancouver AI is a neural network of curious humans bridging creative and technical spaces. We cultivate a commons where community values shape governance and prototypes become shared tools.

luma.com/vanai-april

Sarah Downey is an AI consultant and strategist with 20+ years in nonprofit and social impact leadership, and one of our founding members. She'll frame what's actually happening in the world of AI ethics and help you locate your own ethical compass in it.

What are we building, who does it serve, and who gets quietly flattened if we get lazy?

Martin Lopatka brings Rawls into the agentic workflow era with "Rawlsian Agents: An Application of LLMs to Forge Fairer Bilateral Agreements." Can AI help forge fairer agreements, or does it just automate our blind spots with better syntax?

Sev Geraskin (Economy of Wisdom / Polargrid) comes at the same beast from another angle with "Ethics for the AI Age." What if our economic systems measured care, wisdom, and relational contribution instead of worshipping productivity like a haunted spreadsheet?

Then we put them in dialogue and let the ideas spar. Martin asks whether AI can help us negotiate fairness. Sev asks what happens if we measure care instead of productivity. That's the actual juice. This is the kind of room Vancouver AI was built for.

Venessa & Makaidea: Squamish Nation Opening

We open with Venessa Gonzales AKA chiyakselut and Makaidea Gonzales bringing a Squamish West Coast traditional welcome song and blessing rooted in multi-generational knowledge.

We're going to talk about intelligence, ethics, systems, and the future and we’ll start by remembering that not all intelligence was invented in a lab, funded by venture capital, or stuffed into a chatbot with a cute product name.

A few more pieces from the commons:

The meetup is the spark. The Responsible AI Professional Certification is where we turn the spark into a working practice.

RAP (Responsible AI Professional) is a 4-week certification program for leaders, executives, and practitioners who need to understand, implement, and govern responsible AI practices.

If you’re deploying, teaching, governing, buying, advising, or explaining AI, this is a practical next step.

Four weeks. Built for leaders, executives, and practitioners who need to do more than nod gravely when someone says "AI governance." You work through real scenarios. You apply global frameworks like UNESCO, OECD, NIST, and IEEE.

Responsible AI Professional Training & Certification

​The organizations that will lead aren't the ones with the fastest models. They're the ones with people who know how to assess risks, apply frameworks, and navigate complexity before deployment.

luma.com/ai-ethics

Cohort capped at 30. See the program and apply: https://luma.com/ai-ethics

The BC + AI Ecosystem Association is alive, weird, useful, and growing.

BC + AI is a grassroots, community-powered association for the people actually building, questioning, teaching, funding, researching, governing, and remixing AI in this province.

If you’ve been orbiting the community, now’s a good time to actually join the thing. Members get access to the private community, member calls, discounts, spotlights, and a stronger seat at the table as we build public-interest AI infrastructure for BC.

Individual membership is $340/year. Students $115/year. Team tiers exist.

And the math is almost rude not to mention: BC + AI members save $750 on the Responsible AI Professional Certification. Joining first leaves you $410 ahead.

Membership info: https://bc-ai.ca/membership/

So here’s the move:

Grab a ticket. Bring a friend. Bring your questions. Bring your skepticism. Bring your weird little moral compass.

The machine is not steering itself.

See you Wednesday,

KK

Vancouver AI / BC + AI
Multi-modal, multi-cultural, radically local, and future-facing.

PS. May is going to be our biggest month yet. Web Summit hits Vancouver, the RAP certification cohort kicks off, and the regular community calendar doesn't slow down for any of it. 

May 6: CV + AI Community Meetup

AI is everywhere. It's in your phone, your work, your news feed. Some people are all-in, building with it every day. Others are worried…. about jobs, about…

luma.com/courtenay

May 6: AI Ethical Futures Lab

Four months ago, AEFL was a WhatsApp group and an idea. Now it's 80+ people having real conversations about where AI is taking us, and what we're going to do…

luma.com/verity

May 10: Calm Before the Storm #WebSummit2026

Genuine people, questionable ideas, and maximum realness. If you accidentally learn something, make a friend, or start a…

luma.com/web-summit

May 12: Mind, AI & Consciousness Community Party

The conversations Web Summit won't have. 20,000+ people in the convention center. We're at Tanya's studio in East Van. MAC has been meeting monthly for over a…

luma.com/MACsocial04

May 14: AI Film Club

Monthly screenings, technical deep-dives, and creative experiments with AI tools transforming film and media production. Join us for the 2026 launch of BC +…

luma.com/aifilm

May 21: AI in Education Meetup

Hyperstition: Stories That Build Themselves What if the stories we tell about AI in education are already shaping what AI becomes? Join us for our 8th AI in…

luma.com/hyperstition

May 25: AI Animation & Filmmaking Accelerator

BC + AI Ecosystem presents our 2nd AI Animation & Filmmaking Accelerator where you'll build a complete animated short using the AI-powered production pipeline…

luma.com/Toons

May 27: Vancouver AI Community Meetup

Vancouver AI welcomes the full spectrum... builders, artists, researchers, students, public servants, founders, the AI-curious, and the beautifully confused.…

luma.com/vanai-may

Before I tell you about a thing we built, I want to give you something you can use at work today.

I’ve spent the last three years teaching AI to working professionals. Executives. Nonprofit leaders. Creatives. Comms teams. Founders. Not machine learning engineers. Regular people doing real work under real pressure with powerful tools and almost no guidance.

Across all those workshops, office hours, and late-night conversations, one thing became obvious.

Most people do not need more prompts.

They need a way to decide whether an AI-assisted decision is actually responsible before it touches a real person.

So here’s the filter I use.

Three questions. Every time. Steal them!

The Three Question Deployment Test

Question 1: If this AI gets it wrong, who eats the consequences?

This is the first question because it cuts through the fantasy fast.

When AI gets something wrong, the damage does not land on the model. It lands on a person. A job applicant who never gets seen. A patient who gets deprioritized. A junior staffer who is told to trust the output and move on.

The cost is always human. Usually specific. Usually borne by someone with less power than the person approving the system.

So name them.

Not “the user.”
Not “the public.”
A real person.

A first-time job applicant.
A patient navigating care in a second language.
An employee who cannot safely challenge the machine.

If you cannot name the person carrying the downside, you have not thought hard enough about the deployment.

(This is the ground we cover in Week 3, Deployment Ethics. When is AI ready. When should it never be used. We build a Deployment Checklist you actually use.)

Question 2: Would the subject be pissed if they knew?

This one is brutally simple. Imagine telling the person affected exactly how AI was used.

Would they feel informed? Or would they feel tricked?

That reaction tells you a lot.

This is not an argument against using AI. It is a test for whether your use can survive daylight. If transparency would make the whole thing feel sketchy, the problem is not optics. The problem is the decision.

If you would not want to disclose it, stop and ask why.

(This question straddles Week 2, Privacy and Consent, and Week 4, Authenticity, deepfakes, and trust erosion. Two of the heaviest weeks of the course.)

Question 3: What is the catch layer?

AI is wrong in a very particular way. It is wrong fluently.

That is what makes it dangerous.

Humans hesitate when they are unsure. Language models often do the opposite. They deliver guesswork in the same tone they deliver truth. So the question is not whether the system makes mistakes. It will. The question is what catches those mistakes before they ship.

A senior editor reviews every line.
A recruiter looks at every rejection.
A researcher checks every citation against source material.

No catch layer means you are borrowing confidence from a machine and calling it judgment.

Bad trade.

That’s the test.

If you only remember three things from this email, make it these:

Who pays when it fails.
How it looks in full daylight.
What catches it before harm leaves the building.

(This is Week 1 territory, the confidence accuracy gap, hallucinations, confabulation. When inaccuracy is annoying vs dangerous. You leave with a Personal AI Inventory that maps every system you use and the catch layer behind it.)

Responsible AI Professional Certification is a four-week live program for people who want to use AI well without becoming a liability to their team, organization, clients, or community.

We cover foundations and governance, privacy and consent, deployment ethics, labour and environmental impacts, authenticity, deepfakes, and trust. You leave with practical artifacts you can actually use, including an AI Inventory, an Ethics Assessment, a Deployment Checklist, and an Ethics Impact Assessment.

This is for people who want a real standard. Something they can defend in a meeting, explain to a board, use with clients, or bring back to their team.

Four Fridays starting May 22nd 2026.
Live sessions.
Small cohort.
Built with Martin Lopatka and Sarah Downey.

Responsible AI Professional Certification Course

Lead with ethics in an AI-first world. ​Every organization is deploying AI. Most are doing it without governance frameworks, without ethics training, without asking the hard questions.

luma.com/ai-ethics

And even if you never take the course, run these three questions for the next month on every serious AI use around you. You will start seeing the cracks immediately.

Technology is not neutral and neither are we.

Kris Krüg

Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem Association
Multi-modal, multi-cultural, radically local, and future-facing.

AI is everywhere right now—in your phone, your work, your news feed. Some people are excited and building with it daily. Others have real concerns about jobs, privacy, and what happens when we automate too much.

Here's what we think: both positions make sense.

That's why we're starting Comox Valley AI… a space where we can be curious AND critical.

Where we ask the bigger questions:

• How do we stay authentic?

• How do we build better community?

• What does it mean to be human when AI can do so many things we used to do?

CV + AI Meetup #0

📅 Wednesday, April 8
🕠 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM
📍 Native Sons Hall, 360 Cliffe Ave, Courtenay

CV + AI Community Meetup #0

AI is everywhere. It's in your phone, your work, your news feed. Some people are all-in, building with it every day. Others are worried…. about jobs, about…

luma.com/comox

This is our first informal gathering… no agenda, no formal structure. Just real people meeting face-to-face to figure out what this community wants to be.

You don't need to be technical. Whether you're excited, concerned, or just curious—if you're in the Valley and thinking about where AI is going, you belong in this room.

We already have 39 people registered. We'd love you to join us.

RSVP here: https://luma.com/comox

CV + AI is a regional chapter of BC + AI, a nonprofit building community-driven AI spaces across British Columbia. Our Vancouver gatherings have grown to 250+ people monthly, with 37% women members… not your typical tech crowd.

Questions? Reply to this email or reach out to Lourdes Gant (lourdesgant@manateeholdings.com), our Regional Lead for Comox Valley.

Hope to see ya April 8,

P.S. Want to know what this community actually sounds like? Here are three recent talks from our YouTube. Start anywhere.

AI UX Design: ChatGPT Interfaces Are Already Obsolete
Allen Pike (Forestwalk Labs) maps the shift from chatbot gimmicks to context-native interfaces. The future of AI interaction isn't typing into a box—it's software that knows what you're doing and does the next obvious thing.

Should We Let Our Brains Connect to the Internet?
Dr. Judy Illes, Distinguished Professor at UBC and neuroethics pioneer, breaks down the revolution happening where neuroscience meets AI—how tech is already decoding consciousness, treating neurological disorders, and the ethical blind spots we're ignoring.

I Built 52 Startups in 52 Weeks with AI Coding Agents
Michael Yagudaev shut down 51 of them. The brutal, unfiltered truth about AI coding: more output doesn't mean better outcomes. One of the most honest talks we've hosted.

MCP Tips and Tricks Expert Level
A deep technical session on Model Context Protocol from our community. If you're building with MCP or want to understand why it matters, this is the one.

Hey friends,

This Wednesday. March 25. H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. Doors at 6, ceremony at 7. Meetup #27.

Welcome to Vancouver AI

BC’s grassroots AI collective where technologists, artists, researchers, and storytellers build the future together.

We gather monthly across disciplines, territories, and modalities to explore how AI can serve culture, community, and creativity.

luma.com/rubric

If you've been meaning to come, this is the one. Three things happening that you won't see anywhere else this month.

Lawrence Okolo leads VASI, an open-source robotics and ML research lab right here in Vancouver. While everybody else is benchmarking chatbots, Lawrence is putting large language models on wheels. He's bringing the hardware.

Mayumi Rollings from Tiny Ghost Studios has been co-running our AI Film Club contests and the community is producing genuinely stunning work. She's screening a highlight reel of the best submissions from the first three rounds and launching Round 4.

And I just got back from the National Summit on AI & Culture, where the Government of Canada put 233 people from 160 organizations in a room with both federal ministers to figure out what AI means for Canadian culture. I'm bringing the dispatch home.

Here's why that matters for this community: we showed up as a bench. Anthonia from Ethos Lab. Loc Dao from DigiBC. Philippe Pasquier from the Metacreation Lab at SFU. Jesse McKee from 221A. Eight BC organizations in total. Philippe and I caught Minister Evan Solomon & Minister Marc Miller at the exhibition and demo'd Autolume to them directly. The first tool that lets artists train their own model on their own data, on their own computer. No cloud. No scraped data. The federal Culture Minister got a hands-on look at what consent-based AI training looks like when it actually works.

And then Ana Serrano, President of OCAD University, named BC + AI Ecosystem Association from the main stage as a model grassroots-to-national AI organization. In front of both ministers and the full room. Nine months old.

None of that happens without the community that shows up every month under this dome. The 27 consecutive months of starting in ceremony. The 250+ paid members who fund the infrastructure. The people who present half-finished projects because this room is where you bring the work before it's ready. The AI Film Club members making things nobody asked them to make. The kids at Ethos Lab shipping real products. The SIG leaders running reading groups and consciousness debates and animation workshops on their own time.

BC + AI Events · Events Calendar

The heartbeat of BC’s AI community: Vancouver AI gatherings and every people-powered breakthrough across the province. Multi-modal, multi-cultural, radically local, and future-facing.

luma.com/vancouver-ai

This is what a self-organizing community looks like when it gives a damn about where this revolution goes and who gets to steer.

Wednesday. Be in the room.

The details: When: Wednesday, March 25, 2026. Doors 6:00 PM. Program 7:00 PM. Where: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre RSVP: https://luma.com/rubric

BC + AI Ecosystem Association is a registered nonprofit built by the people in this room. Membership is $340/year and it gets you into a professional network of builders, researchers, artists, and educators going after bigger projects together, plus discounts on workshops and trainings, access to our group chats, and the satisfaction of investing directly into BC's AI industry. Join: https://bc-ai.ca/membership/

See you under the dome.

Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem

Multi-modal. Multi-cultural. Radically local. Future-facing.

P.S. If you want to know what this community actually sounds like, here are the some recent videos from our YouTube channel. Start anywhere.

AI UX Design: ChatGPT Interfaces Are Already Obsolete

Allen Pike (Forestwalk Labs) maps the shift from chatbot gimmicks to context-native interfaces. The future of AI interaction isn't typing into a box. It's software that knows what you're doing and does the next obvious thing.

MCP Tips and Tricks Expert Level

A deep technical session on Model Context Protocol from our community. If you're building with MCP or want to understand why it matters, this is the one.

I Built 52 Startups in 52 Weeks with AI Coding Agents

Michael Yagudaev shut down 51 of them. This is the brutal, unfiltered truth about AI coding: more output doesn't mean better outcomes. One of the most honest talks we've hosted.

Should We Let Our Brains Connect to the Internet?

Dr. Judy Illes, Distinguished Professor at UBC and neuroethics pioneer, breaks down the revolution happening where neuroscience meets AI. How tech is already decoding consciousness, treating neurological disorders, and the ethical blind spots we're ignoring

Mind, AI & Consciousness: Full MAC Takeover Show - Feb 2026 meetup

Something Big is Happening: Kling 3, SeeDance 2 & the Orchestration Era - AI Film Club

LLM As a Black Box - Tanya Slingsby

Hey all -

Quick one: Animation Accelerator: AI-Powered Filmmaking starts next week.

Animation Accelerator: AI-Powered Filmmaking

A two-session intensive where you'll build a complete 30-40 second animated short using the AI-powered production pipeline from Tiny Ghost Studios.

luma.com/anime

This is a two-session online intensive where you build a complete 30–40 second animated short using the AI-powered production pipeline Tiny Ghost Studios uses on paying client work.

Dates: Mon Mar 2 + Mon Mar 9
Time: 6–9pm PST (Zoom)
Work between sessions: 10–16 hours (required to finish)
Leads: Luke Minaker + Mayumi Rollings
Cost: $650 CAD (+ ~$50 credits/subscriptions)
Seats: 20 max

​Led by Luke Minaker (30 years in animation, directing since age 21) and Mayumi Rollings, this workshop teaches the actual workflow they use on paying client work

Optional bonus: screening slot at BC + AI Film Club (250 industry attendees - Mar 12).

AI Film Club: 03/12

Monthly screenings, technical deep-dives, and creative experiments with AI tools transforming film and media production.

luma.com/cgi

If you’ve been meaning to stop theorizing and actually test a real pipeline, this is the cleanest way I know to do it.

Tickets: https://luma.com/anime

— Kris & Luke & Mayumi

Two Monday evenings (March 2 & 9, 6-9 PM online), with 10-16 hours of guided production work between sessions. You'll leave with portfolio-ready work and an optional screening opportunity at BC + AI Film Club.

​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/

I didn’t ask for this. None of us did.

One day you’re a photographer, designer, writer, filmmaker building a career on skills you spent years developing. The next day, someone in Silicon Valley has scraped your work into a dataset, trained a model on it, and is selling the ability to generate something “like yours” to anyone with twenty bucks a month.

My work is in there. I released thousands of photos on Flickr under Creative Commons over the past two decades, and when I checked a dataset search tool, I found roughly 1,800 of my images in a major training corpus. That doesn’t mean every AI model used them, training pipelines vary, and the tool shows evidence, not certainty… but it means the consent story around AI is exactly as casual as critics claim.

I’m sympathetic to the people who want to resist. I understand the impulse to refuse, to opt out, to fight back. But I’ve also spent the last two years working with hundreds of creative professionals who are trying to figure out what to actually do in this moment. And what I’ve learned is that neither pure resistance nor uncritical adoption gets you anywhere useful.

So I’m asking you to walk forward with both hands full.

This is for creatives who feel two things at once: anger about the non-consensual training mess, and curiosity about what these tools can do inside a real practice.

The Non-Consensual Moment

Let’s name what’s real. The consent problem is real.

AI systems were trained on the creative output of humanity… photographs, writing, code, music, art… largely without permission. Some of us released work under licenses that technically allowed it. Many didn’t. The fact that companies are now settling billion-dollar lawsuits over training data tells you everything you need to know about how legitimate those practices were.

The junior pipeline problem is real. The entry-level work that used to train senior creatives is disappearing fast. You’d get hired at a studio, spend six months converting approved assets into different formats, and in the process learn the systems, the clients, the back-and-forth. That’s how juniors became seniors. When AI handles that work, we lose the pathway and we don’t yet know what replaces it.

The dependency question is real. If you don’t use a muscle, you lose it. What happens when we stop doing the first stages of creative work ourselves? When we outsource idea generation, research synthesis, early drafts? We’re all participants in an experiment we didn’t sign up for, and the results aren’t in.

These aren’t hypothetical concerns. They’re happening now. Anyone who tells you they’ve got it all figured out is either selling something or not paying attention.

And yet.

I’ve spent two years rebuilding my creative practice around these tools, and I’ve never felt more capable.

Not because the tools are magic, they fail constantly, in ways I’ll get to… but because learning to work with them has forced me to get clearer about what I actually bring to the work. The parts that are mine.

Both things are true. The system that created these tools violated consent on a massive scale, and working with them has made me a better creative professional. I’m asking you to hold that contradiction and keep walking.

The Human Moat

Here’s the part that matters most, and the part that’s hardest to hear: if you don’t know who you are as a creative, AI will expose that.

AI is a mirror. It amplifies whatever you bring to it. Bring confusion, get generic slop. Bring clarity about your perspective, voice, and values, get something that actually sounds like you.

The people I’ve watched thrive with these tools aren’t the most technically sophisticated. They’re the ones who can answer questions like: What do I believe about this work? How do I make decisions? What would I never say? What do I notice that others miss?

This is the human moat. Not “creativity” in some abstract sense, everyone claims that. The moat is judgment. Taste. Discernment. The ability to look at ten options and know which one is right, and be able to articulate why.

Close your eyes for a second. Think of one thing you do in your creative work that you would never give up to AI. Not because you couldn't automate it, but because it's the part that makes the work yours. That thing? That's your creative DNA. That's the piece worth protecting.

HERE'S HOW WE PRACTICE THIS

This is exactly what Peter Bittner and I teach in AI Upgrade for Creative Professionals.

Over 100 graduates across 7 cohorts. Writers, designers, photographers, strategists, filmmakers. People who showed up skeptical and left with agency.

Cohort 8 starts February 5th. Three spots left.

AI Upgrade for Creative Professionals – 6-Week Certification Course

Join globally-recognized tech-artist Kris Krüg and new media innovator Peter Bittner for an immersive journey into the cutting-edge tools and transformative strategies reshaping creative industries.

www.theupgrade.ai/courses/ai-upgrade-for-creative-professionals

This isn't about tool hype or twelve-subscription stacks. It's about workflows that give you clarity about who you are as a creative in a moment when AI will expose everyone who doesn't know.

What you'll build:

• Week 2: Your own ‘Second Brain’ knowledge base… built from your work, trained on your material, reflecting your judgment

• Week 3: Prompting frameworks that capture your voice, not generic AI slop

• Week 4: AI assistants that amplify your creative DNA instead of flattening it

• Week 6: A capstone project that proves you can hold both hands full and keep walking

Six weeks. 90-minute live sessions every Thursday (12-1:30pm ET). Two personal coaching calls with me. Hands-on labs. Professional certification.

The investment is $1,499. What you're actually getting: clarity about who you are as a creative in a moment that didn't ask your permission.

THE INVITATION

The most critical voices on AI… the skeptics, the resistors, the people with genuine concerns about consent and labor and dependency… those are exactly the people we need engaged in this conversation.

If the most thoughtful critics opt out, the decisions about how this technology develops get made by the people who are all-in. The governance. The norms. The policies. They're being shaped right now by whoever shows up.

I'm not asking you to abandon your critique. Keep it. The fears are real. The problems are real. The non-consensual nature of this whole situation is real.

But engage anyway. Learn enough to know what you're criticizing. Get in the room, because the room is making decisions whether you're in it or not.

Both hands full. Left hand holds the critique… the stolen work, the collapsing pipelines, the genuine uncertainty about what we're creating. Right hand holds the curiosity… the workflows that might give you back some agency, the clarity about your own creative identity that the mirror forces you to develop.

Walk forward. The moment didn't ask your permission. Neither did any of the other moments that reshaped creative work… the printing press, photography, digital tools, the internet. Creatives have always had to navigate new capabilities that threatened to commodify their work. The ones who thrived learned to use the new tools while holding onto what made them irreplaceable.

This moment is no different. Harder, maybe. Faster, certainly. But not different in kind.

Both hands full. Keep walking.

Enroll here: https://www.theupgrade.ai/courses/ai-upgrade-for-creative-professionals

— KK

P.S. Peter and I co-teach this. I bring the creative practice and philosophical framework. He brings 8 years as a UC Berkeley journalism lecturer and his work with New York Times, CNN, Bloomberg. The combination works.

P.P.S. If you're reading this thinking "finally someone gets it"… this course is where we actually do the work.

Learn how to use cutting-edge AI tools to enhance your storytelling, generate stunning visuals, streamline workflows, and push the boundaries of creative expression.

Hey friends, here's what we're talking about in BC + AI Ecosystem right now:

What do I tell my teenager about jobs? This came up in our last BC + AI Office Hours. Multiple parents with kids aged 14-20, and none of them know what career advice makes sense anymore. Entry-level positions are disappearing… but those are how people become seniors. Trades? Philosophy? Gap year? Nobody has answers, but at least we're asking the question out loud.

When your best friend is a robot: That's Alexandra Samuel's talk on January 28. She spent a year building a relationship with a custom AI named Viv and turned it into a podcast (Me + Viv).

Me + Viv

How does a smart, capable woman handle a midlife crisis in today's world? She hatches her own Al coach.

podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/me-viv/id1847891375

The documentation is honest. The questions are uncomfortable. She's keynoting our 25th monthly meetup at the Planetarium. ~30 tickets left.

​What does it actually mean to go full cyborg? Not the chrome-plated fantasy, not the LinkedIn productivity cosplay, but as a daily practice, with all the mess that implies?

The soft violence of AI discourse: Erica Lapadat-Janzen works with SFU's Metacreation Lab on artist-led model training. She's asking about extraction, consent, and who gets to set the terms. Not the usual AI event fare.

AI discourse is full of soft violence: extraction dressed up as innovation, and fear dressed up as morality. ​Erica cuts through it with craft, showing what happens when you train on your work and own the weird outcomes.

Design thinking for vibe coders: Maya Bruck is bridging the gap between "ship fast" and "ship well." UX fundamentals for the rapid prototyping era.

​Maya Bruck brings UX fundamentals to the vibe coding era, showing how to prototype rapidly with AI without sacrificing usability, accessibility, or user research.

All three are speaking January 28 at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. All-women lineup.

Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 01/28

If you’ve been quietly building something, bring it. If you’re wrestling with how AI is changing you, bring that too.

luma.com/liftoff

The reset is real. I said something in BC + AI coworking last week that I keep coming back to: "Anyone learning Claude Code now has as much advantage as anyone else. Everyone kind of got reset."

That's what it feels like. Nobody's behind. The floor shifted under everyone's feet.

250 members. 35% women. Weekly coworking running. AI Film Club launched. The community is asking real questions. Interconnecting. Doing the work.

Building a Responsible & Inclusive AI Future for British Columbia

Discover BC + AI: a multi-modal, multi-cultural, radically local, and future-facing AI ecosystem built on ethics, creativity, and community.

bc-ai.ca

All of this…. the office hours, the coworking, AI Film Club, Mind, AI & Consciousness, the meetups, the Braintrust Groupchat… runs on membership. 250 people have joined so far. $340/year for individuals, $115 for students.

What you get: members-only WhatsApp, 25% off meetup tickets, coworking invites, weekly calls with me and the team, and early access to whatever we're building next.

What we get: the ability to keep doing this without chasing sponsors or selling your attention.

If this community is useful to you, membership is how it stays alive: bc-ai.ca/membership

Come through if that sounds like your people.

This week:

Jan 22: AI + Education at Ethos Lab (free)

​The ED + AI initiative inside BC + AI brings people together to slow down, compare notes, and design with care: consent‑first, equity‑minded, place‑rooted.

Jan 22: Mind, AI & Consciousness (MAC) Deepdive #9

Today’s LLMs (like GPT) spit out human-like prose, but do they mean anything by it? Or are they just statistical puppets mimicking patterns without a shred of comprehension?

Coming up:

Feb 12: AI Film Club #2 (sound & audio)

​We combine film screenings with technical deep-dives, creative experiments, and real talk about how AI is changing production, post, distribution, and storytelling itself.

Feb 25: Vancouver AI: Mind, AI & Consciousness (MAC)

​This month is hosted by MAC our Mind, AI, and Consciousness crew. They’re the people in the BC + AI ecosystem philosophy special interest group where people have been grappling with questions that don't have clean answers.

See you in the chat, at coworking, or at the Planetarium!

Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem

P.S. Recent videos worth your time:

The Squatchie Awards: Six awards for the people who made this ecosystem more real in 2025. Not for followers. For showing up and building.

AI Film Club: Launch Night: The first meetup for filmmakers, animators, and creative technologists exploring how AI is transforming film, video, and work itself. Monthly. In-person. Vancouver.

Sev Geraskin: Community Spotlight: A founder's journey from hackathon prompt to nonprofit AI work. What happens when you build with soul instead of scale.

Gabriel George Sr. Welcome & Peace Song: Elder Gabriel George Sr. of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation opened Meetup #24 with teachings on land, water, and relatives. This is how we start.

I've been thinking about why BC + AI feels different.

It's not the perks. It's not the programming. It's the operating system underneath… the values we chose before we built anything else. That’s why BC + AI looks the way it does:

Ethics by default. Bias isn't a PR problem to spin. Privacy isn't a checkbox. Climate impact isn't someone else's concern. These are design constraints that make our work better.

We chose transparency over hype. You've never seen me promise AGI timelines or market dominance. You've seen me document what's working, what's breaking, and what we're learning in real time. Our wins. Our L's. All of it.

Lateral intelligence over top-down control. The 500-member group chat that actually works. The office hours where anyone can show up. The subgroups that self-organize around what matters to them. This is infrastructure for collaboration, not compliance.

Built in public. We share workflows while they're still messy. Open datasets so more people can ask better questions. Document what worked and what died so the whole network learns faster than any one person grinding alone. Knowledge doesn't compound when you hoard it.

In three months, 200 people became Founding Members. For conversations that cut through bullshit. For peers who actually build. For shared context that makes the work less lonely. For the ability to build together instead of solo speedrunning through somebody else's terms of service.

Tonight at midnight, the Founding Member chapter closes. You can join BC + AI after that. Same community, same direction. We’re just switching chapters, and the Founding rate ends.

If you're already in, thank you. You backed this when it was messy, unproven, and running on volunteer energy. You showed up to early meetups when we were still figuring out basic logistics. You funded the network before we had proof it would matter. That faith built what exists now.

If you’re not joining, that’s completely valid too. Thank you for reading. Thank you for paying attention. Thank you for being part of the ecosystem even from the edges.

The future isn’t something we predict. It’s something we prototype together.

Building a Responsible & Inclusive AI Future for British Columbia

Discover BC + AI: a multi-modal, multi-cultural, radically local, and future-facing AI ecosystem built on ethics, creativity, and community.

bc-ai.ca

See you in 2026,

Kris Krüg
778. 898. 3076
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem Association

PS. FOUNDING MEMBER RATES (Midnight Deadline, December 31)
Individual: $240/year | Student: $80/year | Team (5 seats): $600/year

Permanent founder badge + launch-year recognition
→ bc-ai.ca/membership

2026 is going to be weird.

The tools are mutating faster than anyone can track. Systems are under pressure. The gap between people who get it and people guessing is widening every week.

Your advantage won't be the newest model. It'll be the people in your network and the context you're building with them right now.

BC + AI is a nonprofit professional network for people working at the intersection of AI and impact across British Columbia. We're researchers, builders, creatives, educators, founders, public sector innovators, life sciences teams, and policy makers. Different domains, shared stakes.

BC + AI Ecosystem | Building a Responsible & Inclusive AI Future for British Columbia

Discover BC + AI: a multi-modal, multi-cultural, radically local, and future-facing AI ecosystem built on ethics, creativity, and community.

bc-ai.ca

The mission is simple: BC builds its own AI future instead of importing everyone else's defaults.

What you get as a Founding Member:

• WhatsApp Lounge + Discord for daily signal, collaboration, real talk

• Quarterly member calls with guest experts and ecosystem updates

• Weekly Member’s ‘Office Hours’ Zoom and direct access to the community

• 25% off Vancouver AI Community Meetup monthly tickets

• 25% off TheUpgrade.ai workshops and training

• Coworking access + HR MacMillan Space Centre discounts & perks

175 members across sectors have already joined in our first three months. We're building this in public, together.

Join BC + AI as a Founding Member

Deadline: Tuesday, December 31 at midnight. After that, the Founding Members chapter locks and this window closes.

P.S. Need an invoice for your company? Hit reply and I'll send one over.

Kris Krüg
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem Association

Discover BC + AI: a multi-modal, multi-cultural, radically local, and future-facing AI ecosystem built on ethics, creativity, and community.

Hey friends,

It’s Monday morning, second week of December.Sun’s up, birthday around the corner (mine)… and our community’s birthday too. Our little Vancouver AI experiment is officially TWO YEARS OLD!

For 24 months in a row, on the last Wednesday of the month, we’ve dragged some of the most creative, sharp, technically-fucking-astute humans in this city into the same room…. people who care about where this is all going.

Every month has been a silo-busting, genre-smashing good time exploring what it means to be human in an age of synthetic everything. We explore what this wave of AI makes possible and we ask the tough q’s:

• Where are we actually headed?

• Where do we want to be headed?

• And what are we going to do when we get there?.

In the next couple of weeks, we’ve got four events queued up, including our December 17th community meetup… the official 24-month mark.

December Vancouver AI Community Meetup

It's dark December in Vancouver. The solstice approaches. Two years ago, we started gathering trying to figure out what AI meant for the work we make and the…

luma.com/awards

Check out the upcoming event list and our draft calendar for next year including the themes we’re digging into, the formats we’re experimenting with and the collaborations we’re lining up! :)

We’ve already sketched out a full year of programming. We’re not winging it. We’re building it on purpose.

Upcoming Events Calendar

The heartbeat of BC’s AI community: Vancouver AI gatherings and every people-powered breakthrough across the province.

lu.ma/vancouver-ai

This year, we turned the meetups into a nonprofit and started building real infrastructure around the community; so far, 150 people have stepped up as founding members, and together we’ve been piloting programs, partnerships, and new formats to see what this thing can really do.

Building a Responsible & Inclusive AI Future for British Columbia

Discover BC + AI: a multi-modal, multi-cultural, radically local, and future-facing AI ecosystem built on ethics, creativity, and community.

bc-ai.ca

We’re keeping the Founding Member drive open for 3 more weeks. After that, we close this chapter, the price goes up, and we lock in the next phase of our program.

We’re organizing to be more than the sum of our parts.

• To go after projects bigger than what any of us could pull off solo

• To make Vancouver the centre for AI in Canada

• To do it with rigor, ethics, creativity, and a sense of humour

And we’re not doing it alone.

With partners across creative tech, space and science, and the indigenous technology worlds, we’re already pushing on what’s possible and what’s responsible.

YOUR MOVE

If you’ve been orbiting the community, coming to the odd event, or lurking on the edges thinking:

“Yeah, I should really get more involved…”

This is the nudge.

Membership - BC + AI Ecosystem

Join BC+AI as a member to become part of a grassroots-driven, ethical AI community in British Columbia. Access exclusive events, connect with innovators, and contribute to shaping a responsible AI future.

bc-ai.ca/membership

Lock in the early chapter with us. Help shape what this becomes, not just watch it from the outside.

https://bc-ai.ca/membership/

Upcoming events are listed below. I’d love to see you at one of them… or in the chats, on office hours, or inside a project we haven’t even named yet.

Mind, AI, and Consciousness Deepdive 12/11

Topic: The Case for Embodied AI

luma.com/MACdeepdive8

BC + AI Members Holiday Social: 12/13

Cozy Christmas chaos at Parker Street Studios.

luma.com/festivus

Vancouver AI Meetup: 12/17

It's dark December in Vancouver. The solstice approaches.

luma.com/awards

Surrey AI Meetup #10: 12/23

Surrey AI Community at The Royal Canadian Legion Branch

luma.com/slurrey

See you out there,

Kris Krüg (KK)
Executive Director
BC + AI Ecosystem

Join the association → bc-ai.ca/membership/

P.S. If you're already a member, forward this to someone who should be in the room. We're building the network. You know who else belongs here.

Vancouver AI

/ / / We don’t do panels. We do portals. / / / Welcome to Vancouver AI... BC’s grassroots AI collective where technologists, artists, researchers, and storytellers build the future together. We gather monthly across disciplines, territories, and modalities to explore how AI can serve culture, community, and creativity. We host workshops, hackathons, and hard conversations all grounded in a radically local, ethically bold, and creatively ungovernable approach to AI. 🔧 Real tools. 🧠 Big questions. 🌀 Distributed power. 📍Based in Vancouver, BC pulsing across the province and beyond. 🎥 Event archives, AI keynotes, community talks, live rituals, immersive provocations & more. 📡 Tap in: https://lu.ma/vancouver-ai 🌀 Join the BC + AI Ecosystem: https://bc-ai.ca/membership/ 🖤 Subscribe and ride the wave with us.

www.youtube.com/@van_ai