Workshop | Oct 19-23, 2026

Putting AI to Work to Promote Certain Values
Location: Quebec City, tbc

The aim of this workshop is to examine the values conveyed by artificial intelligence systems. The massive deployment of large-scale language models that produce content (text, images, video and music) is accompanied by an imaginary world based on a certain vision of society and the associated values. Similarly, the considerations, particularly economic ones, that underpin these models raise questions at a time when commercial models are being used for public services or, more broadly, in everyday life (for example, the use of personal data in the context of surveillance capitalism). There are increasing calls for greater transparency, for algorithms to be made more explicable, for greater diversity in models (e.g. Black in AI) and for greater algorithmic fairness. Several currents are emerging to explore different ways of questioning these models to shed light on their biases, but also on the values they convey. Finally, the environmental consequences of these algorithms are exacerbating current debates, between techno-solutionism and techno-criticism.

Over the 5 days of the workshop, the presentations will be organised thematically, to encourage in-depth discussion of the various issues raised. A daily summary will consolidate the contributions to produce a coherent whole at the end of the seminar. Finally, an artistic perspective will be added to offer other perspectives on these subjects.

Following this workshop, on Friday, October 23rd, the one-day conference “Improving AI Governance” to review the work carried out during the IVADO-AISSAI thematic semester on the Governance of AI.

This activity is part of the Thematic Semester The Governance of AI, organized under the partnership between IVADO and the AI center for Science and Science for AI (AISSAI-CNRS), and is offered in collaboration with the Obvia.

Your registration for the workshop also gives you access to the conference on October 23, 2026.

Speakers:

Lyse Langlois (Université Laval), Sarah Brown (University of Rhode Island), Marc-Antoine Dilhac (Université de Montréal), Alexandra Bensamoun (Université Paris-Saclay), Pierre Larouche (Université de Montréal), Jean-Gabriel Ganascia (Sorbone Université, LIP6), Antoine Henry (Université de Lille), Julie Marques (INSA), Siddarth de Souza (University of Warwick), Richard Khoury (Université Laval).