In late February the Calgary Public Library invited local artists to apply for a new Creative in Residence post, an Artificial Intelligence Collaborative Artist, meant for someone who works with AI ethically as a creative partner. Most responses to the announcement were hostile, and Calgary mayor Jeromy Farkas was among the critics. The University of Calgary student paper The Gauntlet says the row has pushed the city into a wider argument about AI in art.
The objections are familiar ones: the energy the models use, training on artists' work without consent or payment, and lost commissions as companies and buyers turn to AI for illustration and advertising. Because the library has a long record of backing local artists through its residencies, in which creators share their knowledge with the public, many felt betrayed. The library's call had framed the post as a way to explore the questions the technology raises about creativity and art, but critics saw it as a public institution endorsing a threat to their livelihoods. Jordan Wieban, a former Creative in Residence, started a Change.org petition arguing that an AI residency lends early legitimacy to a technology built to replace human artists.
The library went ahead and chose Paul Freeman, an interdisciplinary artist trained at the University of Alberta and the Alberta University of the Arts, for a residency that ran from June 29 to September 4, 2026. Freeman began working with Stable Diffusion and other image generators in 2022 and has since built his own custom interface for them.
Freeman told the paper he is well aware of the pushback. He does not dismiss the critics, sees his role as showing a personal investigation of what the technology offers, and treats his practice as an experiment into whether the technology is any good and whether a person can make something with it and call it their own. He describes AI as his medium rather than a tool: neither the brush nor the painter but the paint. His method grows images to enormous sizes rather than stretching pixels, producing works of up to two billion pixels that print 28 feet tall.
Part of the residency was meeting people in workshops and online sessions. Freeman says visitors often arrived suspicious, thinking the work was cheating, and left saying it was not what they expected. He accepts many of the ethical and environmental concerns, and tries to limit his share of the harm by using existing models rather than training new ones, which uses less energy and resources. He admits he cannot speak on those issues with much authority, but does not think generative AI should be written off entirely.
He also agrees that students and beginners who lean on AI too early can stunt their skills and their artistic identity, and says the technology should be used sparingly, ideally with a mentor. The Gauntlet concludes that the residency has shown how much Calgary still needs to talk about AI in art, with artists, industry and institutions all heard.
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