The Ben Mulroney Show - Is the IOC going to ban trans? Also - THE historian, tech talk and AI journalism

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

GUEST:  David O’Keefe — Canadian military historian, professor at Marianopolis college in Montreal Guest: Carmi Levy / Tech journalist  GUEST: Professor Alex Miltsov of Bishop’s University If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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the city toronto dot cae welcome back or welcome rather to to the Ben Mulroney show on this Tuesday, November 11th. A lot of news to get to on this Remembrance Day Tuesday. Thank you so much for joining us. Mike Droulet, great to see you. Thank you. Good to see you. Deis Bargala.

Always great to see you behind the board. And thank you for listening to us. And if you find us on YouTube, thank you for watching us on the YouTube machine. We've got to talk about a pretty seminal moment, a really, really big moment. At this point, it's Olympic history, the IOC is moving forward with a blanket ban. They're preparing to ban transgender women from competing in female categories, period, full stop, likely to take effect in 2026.

There's a working group that's been set up to study the issue and find, quote, consensus. Good luck with that. Officially, no final decision has been made, but sources say the ban is very likely. and they are moving ahead with this because I guess they've been doing some scientific studies or they've commissioned some studies and the findings are that athletes born male retain physiological advantages even after testosterone reduction. And so, you know, it's sort of live by the sword, die by the sword. If you're going to live in a world where we say we're following the science and if the science

leads you here, then you have to adapt based on. on those findings. And this runs very much counter to a lot of the research that has been pushed forth by, I mean, the trans community, the people who are in favor of this. And which has said before, well, you know what? If you reduce the hormones, no, there is no advantage whatsoever. Nothing. There's nothing there.

And, of course, our eyes, you know, what we see with our eyes is clearly has flown in the face of those sorts of statements. I mean, Leah Thomas, so you can't tell me that that person didn't have a physical advantage over everybody else in the pool. Leah Thomas was the swimmer, the American swimmer. Yeah, who had competed on the men's team in university

and then had transitioned. And two years later was winning almost every time they jumped in the pool. And look, you know, I'm not going to engage in the ad, hominem attacks when I when I tell a story like this when I when I share this news and I I believe I'm doing so in a measured way sort of cutting out emotion and cutting out any sort of editorial this is this is this is what it is this is not I'm not there will be people who will ascribe transphobia to this who will suggest that you're denying that trans people exist how you can do that no and I keep going back

fundamentally to the fact that life is about sacrifice and life, life is a series of disappointments. We don't get everything we want. And there's plenty of things in life as the privileged white man who was born with a silver spoon, nepo baby, no talent, blah, blah, blah. Even I have not gotten everything I want. And I don't ascribe evil motivation to those who've denied me the things that I wanted. And at some point, we all have to agree that not everybody gets what everybody wants in life. And this is going to be one of those cases for trans athletes. Now, this doesn't mean that it should be the end of the story. Perhaps this is the next chapter that will then open up the door to a new category at the Olympics where trans... And a special games. Especially, I don't know.

I'm sure there are plenty of people in the in the Paralympics who wish they could be in the Olympics themselves but for reasons of physiology and physical limitation they have a separate Olympics that has its own honor

that has its own pride that has its own legacy that has its own cachet and it is what it is. There is, I, I, I, I, I don't, I don't, I mean, you can, you can ascribe all sorts of ill will and bad motivation to whomever you want doesn't change certain facts. And the science has led the IOC to this, not conclusion, they haven't gotten there yet, they've got a working group, but it seems like it's almost a fait accompli.

Well, if you think about it, you're talking about those other sort of games. I just saw this as well recently that Australia has been named host of the 2030 gay games. And it's going to be taking place obviously 2030. It's all about inclusion and diversity. But there's no qualification standards, no requirements, no barriers for entry

to anyone to participate. It's just you don't get everything you want. And I don't know if one has anything to do with the other. I suspect there is probably something to what I'm about to say. But we raised a generation on participation medals and that we actually did bend the world to the will of everybody gets something. Everybody gets to feel like a winner. And there are consequences to ingraining and inculcating that into the minds of a generation.

That if you don't get what you want, then somebody is depriving you of it. And unfortunately, that is not the world I was born in, in or want to see moving forward. I want to see a world where we fight and we talk and we come up, it will come to understanding. And I'm going to win on one day because I worked really hard. And on another day, I'm going to lose. Heck, I'm going to lose more than I'm going to win in life. And that's just life. There's nothing more or less special about any one person and this is an example of that and how how the trans community responds to this is is going to be quite telling like I'm really hoping that we get to because and again I've said this before

it should be a discussion in me right in me Ben Mulroney the trans community has an ally for about 85% of the things that are important to them but when it comes to this issue and when it comes to you know my daughter in a in a in a change room I'm sorry I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to respectfully disagree. That does not make me a transphobe. And throwing that word around is unhelpful to you. It's not going to change my perspective. But what you are going to do is you're going to take me an 85% ally and turn me into a 100% opponent.

Why would you do that? Why would you do that? And there's lots of people like me. Why would you do that? Why would you look at me, hurl insults at me and other people like me when you have in me someone who believes that you deserve the most respect? and you deserve the most chances at success. I do not think you deserve everything in life

because I don't deserve everything in life. And Mike doesn't deserve everything in life. And my kids don't deserve everything in life. I would like to have everything else. I would love to have everything in life. I promise you. I promise you, if I did, my life would look a lot different than it does. I think the big issue with the argument over time

has been that this idea that you cannot challenge it. Yeah. And so they've gone to science. And the previous studies have been dubious at best. Yeah, but you couldn't challenge those. So if you talk about the science, you look at the hormone replacement theory, therapy. Well, they say that like even after, even once you take those therapies and even if you, once the testosterone leaves the body, there is irreversible skeletal and physiological changes. There is minimal reversal of muscle mass.

Studies show that while hormone replacement therapy does reduce muscle mass and strength in transgender women, the decrease is often modest around 5% after one year and does not fully erase the initial male advantage. And of course it doesn't. These are changes at the genetic level. They are encoded in the very differences between genetic men and genetic women. And I'm hoping that doesn't open up people to say,

well, we're going to start giving hormone drugs to children under the age of 10. Well, good luck with that one. I mean, good luck again. I went to law school. The one thing I know is consent matters. And there's a reason why we don't allow kids to consent to sex, right? Or tattoos.

Or driving. Right? And you can tell me that your child at 14 months knew that as they were born a boy, but they knew they were a girl. That's you saying it. Your kid doesn't know that. And I can say that because I have kids. I know. I know.

And you can say it, but that's you, that's you ascribing. to your kid. That's your that's the reflection of your values on them, not the other way around. And again, like these are complicated issues and I don't pretend to have all the answers. But I do know what's important to me and I do know what I believe

and I try to share it as respectfully as possible. So this isn't going to apply to the winter games coming up. No. But there aren't really any athletes that I know of. It's going to likely apply to Los Angeles with all the different disciplines. Well, we'll have to see the response from other groups.

but I'm sure it won't be pretty up next. One of the great storytellers and the battle to educate Canadians. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney's show. Today is Remembrance Day across this country as we pause to remember, honor, and show respect for those who have put on the uniform and have served. our country whenever our country has called upon them to do so and never more so have we sacrificed more than in the second world war you could argue the first world war as well but and it's not always about the victories sometimes it is about the failures and how we survive those and learn

from them to then move forward and one of the uh um it's not one would be a failure but it was certainly a disaster for Canada was Operation Jubilee, also known as the Dieppe raid on the 19th of August, 1942, where allied, it was an amphibious allied attack on the German-occupied port of Dieppe in northern France, over 65, over 60, 60, 650, I apologize, infantry, mostly Canadians, were supported by a regiment of tanks and they were put ashore for a naval force operation under the protection of the Royal Air Force, and it did not end the way they wanted. And somebody who knows

far more about that than I is David O'Keefe, Canadian military historian, as well as a professor at Marianopoulos College in Montreal. David, welcome to the show. Oh, good morning, Ben. Thank you for having me. Okay, so you are, you're a military historian, but you also teach sort of

Canada's next generation. What is, what's the reception that you get from young Canadians as you teach them about our military history? Well, I think, you know, there's something kind of, you know, going around in the world today, you tend to hear, oh, well, the young generation is really not interested. That's not the case at all. As a matter of fact, the good news is that their interest is extremely high. I mean, I teach a Second World War course at the college, and it's absolutely packed. And we have, you know, standing room only to get in. And that's because they really, really do have an interest in the human nature of the war. It's not necessarily the battles, the tanks, the aircraft. and, you know, the bells, the buttons, and the whistles. So what do you mean about the, what do you mean the human nature of it? They want to know what the human aspect was.

Yeah. And, you know, they want to know what the experience was. They get it in call of duty when it comes to the fun. But they want to know the reality. And I think that's really something that's kind of reassuring, to be honest with you. Actually, you know what? That's a really interesting point. I hadn't even occurred to me.

The immersive nature of first-person shooters can take the risk and sacrifice out of war. when you can just spawn again. You got it. That's a really interesting. So how do you push past sort of the, what their brain has been taught by video games? And by the way, I'm not suggesting that every kid is so dense that they think the world's a video game. But how do you push past that the paradigm that exists in their heads, that's almost omnipresent, into that human aspect of war? Well, I guess, you know, one of the things about teaching history, it's all about developing empathy, and the key is to be able to take them back and almost put them in that, you know, in the shoes of others who have walked before them. And that's, that's the challenge of being a historian to say the least. And you bring in all different types of sources. You bring in, you know, textual sources, you know, oral testimonies. You know, there's even battlefield tours that we do. And, you know, I've been lucky enough. I've been lucky enough that I've been able to walk many, many,

battlefield. So I can bring them in. I mean, I can tell them what it smells like under Vimy Ridge. You know, it's one of those things where you really, you really have to hit them in almost like a, you know, a full spectrum kind of way. But when you do, it's amazing to see. And I, you know what, I haven't had the privilege of going over to Europe yet, but I lived in Quebec City. And I've walked the plains of Abraham and knowing that those seminal battles in the early history of Canada were fought right there. Just to put myself on that field, which doesn't look like a battlefield anymore, but, but, but there's, there is a human connection to it that you can, you can sense it and feel, feel the battle in a way you can't in a book. And so that, that's a really, really interesting, really interesting thing. But there is, there are elements of human interest, like so, you know, so where, where would you place like a, a, a, a Hollywood. movie about war in this discussion that we're talking about. Do those resonate with kids?

They do. As a matter of fact, I mean, I, one of the highlights of the course is actually showing the opening 27 minutes of saving private rights. And it tapes them. And a lot of them, surprisingly, have never seen it. But then again, you know, I'm teaching 17 to 21 year olds and this came out almost 30 years ago. So, but when they do see it, they, it really pins them to their seats. And then they sort of look at me like, oh, like that's kind of what it was like. And I said, yeah, but likely worse. Yeah. And then we start the discussion. So, you know, you get them. And also, too, you have to remember that you're changing demographics of Canada. We're getting a lot. You know, traditionally, we've always seen ourselves as the, as the cavalry, right? Going to

everybody else's rescue, crossing the ocean. But remember, we're getting a lot of kids who are coming now from war-torn countries. Yeah. You know, kids are coming from Syria. Kids are coming from Syria. Kids it was from Afghanistan, Iraq. You know, because you have lived it. Yes. But see, and that's what a really interesting thing that I'd love to hear from you because, you know, we were sharing a story yesterday, and I talked about a bit today about a Nova Scotia school that because they had kids from those war-torn countries in the school, they had asked

Canadian soldiers who were going to come in on Remembrance Day not to wear their military garb because it might trigger those kids to which I took great umbrage. because it is those men and women who would come in as, you know, in their duties as who came to help save those people. And it's incumbent upon our teachers to teach the distinction between the military in your country that triggers you and this, these men and women who helped either liberate you or promote democracy in a way that you wanted to come to this country. and to simply say, oh, military is military is not a beneficial. No, I completely agree with you on that one. It does go down to the teaching. I mean, you can't just simply wave a wand and knock that out.

You have to be able to, you know, make that distinction between them for sure because, you know, the military is not going to go away in this country anytime soon. And, you know, and we still continue to offer that kind of. of, well, I hate to use the term, but cavalry response. In other words, we're there to help. You know, we're not oppressive. We never have been in our history, and God knows we never will be. Do you ever get pushback?

Is there ever a narrative that you have to fight against that somehow Remembrance Day is the glorification of war? Every once in a while I hear that, but not from a lot of people. But I do get it every once in a while as a military historian. In other words, all you study military history, you must love war. I'm like, no, as much as a doctor loves disease. Yeah, that's a great. It's my challenge, right?

It's my challenge. The idea is to open people's eyes up to the horrors of it. So, you know, hopefully down the road, we can figure out a better way of doing things. Well, you know, yeah, I mean, when people say, oh, it's a glorification of war, it's like, no, the words are lest we forget, not let's do it again. Yes, exactly. And I think that's probably the greatest lesson of Remembrance Day without a doubt. Yeah. Well, I just feel that as we were living in a time, David, where, you know, there are so many things that we strive to remember that separate us.

These are things that we should all find common cause in remembering. Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, look, there isn't anything more humbling than more. Yeah. Yeah. David, before I let you go, what's the next mystery that you want to uncover? Well, I've got a working on one right now, my third book. it's all about a Canadian bomber pilot

who gets up to some naughty things in the Second World War so coming out next year okay so I've been told by my boss here that the one thing we have to get really good at on this show is our teases like coming up next on the show is X, Y or Z and we are striving to be better at it

what you just did you teased your book in a way that we wish we teased our show every segment that was incredible I please when it is available if I could read it beforehand so that we could actually have a real conversation sometimes we get those books too late and I don't have a chance to read them

I would love to read that and you come on for two segments we talk about it. Perfect, fantastic Ben. Hey, thanks for all you do. Educating our kids on this part of our history is essential and I really do appreciate it and it's really valued. Thank you.

Well, thank you, Ben. Appreciate it. It's illegal to earn income from a crime, isn't it? So why is Facebook raking in the dough? Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show, and thank you for listening and participating and connecting with us on all platforms. We're a radio show. We're on streaming apps. We're on all podcast platforms.

We're on social media. And, of course, we're on YouTube. So please join us wherever you see fit. And let's build this show together. We always love talking tech. It's part of our lives. as part of our world, and so to help guide us through some of the pivotal stories that will be affecting us today and tomorrow, please welcome.

Karmie, leave you to the show. Karmie, thanks so much for joining us. So, Karmie, last weekend, I was invited by the government of Alberta to give the keynote address at their biannual convention. And I sort of laid out a vision for Canada's future, focusing sometimes on Saskatchewan. And one of the things that I focused on was how Saskatchewan is ideally suited. uh to play a pivotal role in the AI data center race and one of the reasons is their climate advantage with so much money that has to go into the cooling of climate uh of AI data centers that's that's free

money that's that's a free lunch as I called it and I thought I was pretty gosh darn smart and then I open up social media and see that Google is about 10 steps ahead of me and they have a plan to put data centers in space. So I know we're not there yet, but talk to me about why that could be the future. Yeah, they're calling a project Suncatcher. And this is one of the companies, what they like to call moonshot projects. And another one, for example, was Waymo, which was the autonomous vehicle project that has been around for over a decade and is just now getting vehicles on the road.

So basically what a venture would do was it would put satellites in space that are essentially data centers. So solar-powered, very high-powered computing on board, optical networking links so they can sort of send and receive data using high-capacity optical connections, both between satellites in orbit, as well as back and forth to Earth. And so this sounds like sci-fi. It absolutely is. And I think it reflects the fact that, you know, thanks to the AI revolution, thanks to the explosive growth and cloud computing, everything is online now and we need more capacity. And there are communities that are fighting back against data centers because they don't want them in their backyard. Canada, of course, could be a superpower. But, you know,

sometimes when you get on the ground, there's cities that go, you know, I don't want this near me, and they're pushing back. They're saying there's lots of energy, lots of water, make lots of noise, lots of traffic. They just don't want them there. So put them in space. That's kind of one answer. Okay, a couple of, there's a couple of things I want to unpack here. And one of them is, uh, in, in the world, at least of the here and now and data centers, it requires the idea is one of the reasons Saskatchewan would be ideal is we have all of these remote communities that have roads and infrastructure and hospitals and schools and community centers and grocery stores. They all exist right now. And right next to those, virgin acres of

of land or just designed, you plug and play, you drop in a massive data center and you watch that city come to life, that town come to life. I'm trying to square that conception of the manpower and the infrastructure that we need to build those, to make data centers successful on Earth and this idea that they could all exist remotely in space without the hand of man there to oversee them. Yeah, and that's the thing. There's a reason they call these moonshot projects is that, It isn't going to be built tomorrow.

It's not going to be built next year. This is potentially decades into the future because the technology to make a data center work in space as well as it does on the ground simply doesn't exist now. Google's hoping to develop it, hoping to scale it up to that point. But you're absolutely right for now, right now. Like I'm using chat GPT today. I need compute power so that this thing doesn't absolutely bogged down on me.

Canada could potentially be a data center superpower. And if we get our act together, we have the climate, we have the power, we have the technology resources, we have the know-how to pull all of this together, and we have the space, you're absolutely right, it doesn't necessarily need to be. There's no NIMBYism in northern Saskatchewan. No one's saying, because the entire thing is our backyard. So let's use it for that purpose and benefit the world and quite frankly, in the process, benefit ourselves as well. And for those who are trying to understand what that climate advantage means, With current technology, the climate cost, the cooling cost of an AI data center, somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the total cost of running an AI data center. So it's a huge cost that would, that for the most part, could be mitigated in ways that can't be done in most other places.

All right, let's move on to some other things. Meta has a lot of revenue streams, and big companies always do. They place bets on a bunch of different businesses, and that's a lot of. how they make money. It's a little disappointing to hear that one of the biggest companies in the world earns a fortune on fraudulent ads and scams. Up to 10% of the revenue that comes into meta comes in from fraudulence, you know, fraud and fraudsters and scams. This is a frightening number. So that amounts to about $16 billion a year. And they know, and the thing is this is internal data from the company. Reuters dug up a trove of

documentation. A trove. Excellent word. The company knows this. And what they've done is rather than saying, oh, we've got a problem, we're going to shut it down. Instead, they double down on it because this is good for their bottom line. So what they do when they discover a fraudulent ad, so it's selling something, a fraudulent investment scheme, an illegal online casino, selling banned medical products, fraudulent e-commerce schemes, instead of just getting rid of them, what they do is they make them more expensive for the advertisers. So basically saying, we know that it's wrong, but we're going to raise the price because we want to disincentivize them from placing the ad, make it too expensive for them.

But, of course, they're making so much money. And the margins are so high on these scams that, you know, this isn't a disincentive. Those ads stay on. Yeah, well, look, more bad thing about six, seven years ago, I remember there was a rash of ads that were popping up all over social media. My wife's social media was involved and a whole bunch of the women that I worked with over at CTV where people were selling stories, fake articles

about why Marilyn Dennis was finally telling the truth about her career and there was no way to get those fake ads taken down. The legal departments of the entire network were reaching out to it, I believe, Meta at the time and there was nothing that could be done. Fake books that were supposedly written by these women were being touted for sale, and there was nothing that they could do it. I have to assume that that's part of this.

It absolutely is. And what their data shows is that these ads are particularly effective. They get them lots of traction, which means that when they show up in somebody's feed and someone engages with them, they will, in fact, see those ads more because it trips the algorithm, and now suddenly they, they, they, they see a wider audience, there's greater levels of engagement. So it's a self-perpetuating problem.

But of course, if you're an investor, you're a shareholder, you like this because this is what's driving their revenue. If it's driving 10% of their revenue, 15 billion of these what are called higher risk scams are showing up every day. Yeah. It's very difficult when your primary responsibility is fiduciary to your shareholders to say, we're going to turn off this ticket, especially when there's no law. But there is, as abhorrent as this is, there's no law that stops companies.

That's where this conversation ultimately is going to go. Everything dovetails into that one point. This needs to be legislated. This is the type of corporate behavior that needs to be legislated out of companies like meta, because they're not going to do it on their own. You just very laid out perfectly why they will never do it. And this is why the government, specifically Congress has got to come in as the heavy to say, guess what?

You don't get to make money this way anymore. And if you do, there will be penalties that, far outstrip any financial benefit to allowing for this revenue stream to occur. Yeah, and I've been saying that for years, and I look to Europe to set the tone. Europe has introduced a number of pieces of legislation, so the Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act in recent years that hold big tech companies much more accountable than other jurisdictions, and that often sets the tone for other countries to follow right now. The U.S. under the Trump administration, not much appetite for this, but hey, they're only

in office for a few more years at some point the tide is going to turn big tech is going to learn a pretty significant lesson when governments figure out you can't allow this to happen indefinitely carmy levy thank you thanks so much man uh yeah it's uh these stories are absolutely fascinating and this is the type of thing that requires the adults in the room in the form of government to take action because left of their own devices they are just going to keep doing what makes them money and uh yeah that's that's what we that's what we pay you for government government. I'm talking to you. All right. Don't go anywhere when we come back. What's coming up now? What's coming up next? Oh, I can't even find it. Anyway, more to come on the Ben Mulroney show.

so many aspects of who we are and what we do and the jobs that we have made our own over the course of decades, if not centuries. And here to talk about the latest volley in this battle is Professor Alex Miltsov of Bishop's University. He's an associate professor of sociology, and he does research on how people lose employment to AI. Professor, welcome to the show. Yes, good morning. Great to be with you. All right. So I think there will be there will be.

Some people who will be forgiven that when they went online and found a fairly new publication called Le Journal de Cherbrook, the Journal of Sherbrook, they found themselves what they might have thought was a new source of online journalism, only to discover, and perhaps they haven't discovered it yet, that it is entirely AI generated. Talk to us about what the Journal de Cherbrook is. Right. Yes. This is a really interesting. interesting case, that is actually that represents a larger pattern in modern journalism. So basically in late October, a lot of us here in Sherbrook were, basically we discovered this new journal, Journal de Sherbrook, and essentially as the journal stated, the mission of the journal is, was or is to inform public on local, local news, local developments and to serve the community. So when journalists, journalists from La Tribune and other media took a closer

look at the content, they discovered that, well, actually, the journalists who were presented there were AI generated. Okay, so professor, let's just dig into the detail. So this is an online publication that looks and presents as an authentic news source with real people writing real columns, like they have names and bylines. Is that correct? Yes, that was the case initially. Okay.

So this is how the journal. basically started in late October and what was what was really interesting and disturbing at the same time that some of the fake journalists manufactured artificial journalists resembled actual journalists in the city of Sherbrook so there were just some minor changes in their names and they actually looked like some of the journalists in the city so so wait professor you're saying they actually had AI generated images of fake journalists. So they actually had names,

they had faces, and they had stories that they had supposedly written. That's exactly the case. Okay. That is exactly the case. So essentially the fake journalists were based off

real journalists. Real journalists in the city. And they had essentially AI had taken the works of those real journalists and tweaked them and massage them just enough to make them a little bit different. Yeah, I can give you one example.

So we have a pretty famous local journalist, a legal journalist. So his name is Tommy Brochew, and the fake journalist and the Journalist in the Journal of Sherbrooke was Tommy Broder. Okay. So it's just a matter of changing. Sure, one syllable. A few others, yeah. And so the local media were pretty quick at basically. highlighting that. That became a story, a local story, and then a Quebec story. And then

the Journal of Sherbrook removed all these fake journalists. And I actually acknowledged that it was using AI to generate content. And were they able to find an actual human behind this, like somebody whose idea this was, somebody who's responsible for it? So based on the reports in the media, there is an actual person who is running this, Tim Goddreau, who is the owner of the journal Ronald de Sharouk. And again, based on the reports, this person also registered a number of local media in Quebec in different towns and cities in towns in Quebec. So it's not just one case. It's a matter of, well, the person wanted to have allegedly. to build a certain kind of network of jobs.

Yeah, well, listen, there's already an actual, a network of newspapers in Quebec called Le Journale 2. You've got a Journal de Quebec. You've got the Journal de Montreal. I mean, these are, there's a bunch of them. And so this seems like it was at least trying to draft off of that intellectual property. And has this man gone on the record as to what his motivations were? and what sort of reaction when people realize that this was AI,

has there been, I have to assume a negative reaction because this is not, and professor, tell me what you think, there could very well be a role for some sort of AI presence in journalism in communities that have lost their local newspapers, that have lost their local news outlets. There could be some version of an AI-assisted news gathering system. there. But it seems to me, based on what you're saying, is it in Sherbrook, there is a fairly robust local news hub to begin with.

Yes, that's correct. So, yeah, so I'll go step by step here. So essentially, just to give you a context, and I guess this will be interesting to your listeners. So we have a crisis in local media, not only in Quebec, but across Canada. You know, it's the same deal on Ontario. We see local media disappearing. They're struggling to survive. So that's a legitimate issue, real issue, and that has all kinds of ramifications for democracy, for information. And what's also interesting is that people tend to trust local media more compared to kind of more national or international media because it's because of proximity, it's closer to home.

They are oftentimes journalists are their names. and so on and so forth. So in this particular case, we are in a situation where we have a few media outlets, kind of important for our region, for the eastern townships. And so once this story became, like once they discovered what was going on, they were first, many people couldn't believe that, journalists, and people couldn't believe that. They thought it was some kind of, you know, some kind of prank. Somebody was, because it kind of, because it kind of look like a prank. Well, yeah, and I could, I could imagine somebody saying, you know, I wanted to do this as

an intellectual exercise to see how, how much buy-in I could get for an entirely AI-generated newspaper, but it seems like it might be something different. Exactly, exactly. And so, and then the different journalists, media people contacted the person and, well, so they wanted to understand what was. happening. And so it seems to me that the person who's behind this actually reacted to all this reporting. And so currently, when you go to the website, you see that this is more of a personal blog. The person is basically talking about AI and talking about journalism in

general. So it kind of, yeah, Professor, I'd love, we're running out of time, but I would very much love to have you back on the show for a more broad conversation about AI and journalism because, and AI generally, because there are certain professions, like the legal profession, for example, the medical profession and journalism, that one of the reasons I feel it is incumbent upon us to always maintain the human element in all of them is because of the notion, the human notion of self-preservation. I'm going to do this job to the best of my ability and you can trust that I'm going to do it to the best of my ability because the liability that I take on, if I do it wrong, is so great that I'm going to work my butt off to ensure

I get it right. And that's true in the legal profession. That's true in medical. That's true in journalism. Your reputation is everything if you get those things wrong. And there is no such accountability with AI on its own. And I'd love to have a longer conversation with you about what you think about that idea. But in the meantime, I've got to thank you very much.

and we're going to keep an eye on this story and I wish you the very best. Thank you very much, yeah, and this was very well put and I'd love to be back on your show. Thank you very much, Professor. All the best to you. You may have heard of the sex cult nexium

and the famous actress who went to prison for her involvement, Alison Mac. But she's never told her side of the story, until now. People assume that I'm like, this pervert. My name is Natalie Robamed, and in my new podcast, I talked to Allison to try to understand how she went from TV actor to cult member. How do you feel about having been involved

in bringing sexual trauma at other people? I don't even know how to answer that question. Allison after Nexium from CBC's Uncover is available now on Spotify.