In spring 2026, Professor Dan Brown appeared before the Senate of Canada’s Standing Committee on Transport and Communications to discuss intellectual property and safety concerns raised by the rise of generative AI. He highlighted concerns about the use of copyrighted works to train generative AI systems and the potential impact of these technologies on creative professionals, particularly writers and creators from minoritized communities.
Professor Brown has been a faculty member at the Cheriton School of Computer Science since 2000. His research spans computational creativity, music information retrieval and bioinformatics. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University and an S.B. in Mathematics and Computer Science from MIT.
Since 2015, Professor Brown’s research has focused primarily on computational creativity, a field that explores how AI systems can generate works that, if created by humans, would be considered creative. Although the field of computational creativity has existed for decades, the rapid emergence of large language models, vision language models and other generative AI technologies has brought ethical, legal and societal concerns to the forefront.
In this Q&A, Professor Brown discusses the opportunities and limitations of generative AI and explores the ethical, legal and societal questions these technologies raise about creativity, copyright, and the future of creative work.
Read the full Q&A article on the Cheriton School of Computer Science's website.