Earlier this year, Toronto’s public health department quietly flipped the switch on an experiment targeting the city’s most pollution-prone beaches.
Instead of relying on day-old laboratory tests to ensure that people don’t swim in unsafe water, the city tapped the magic of artificial intelligence, contracting with Cann Forecast, a Montreal-based startup whose predictive modeling products use AI and machine learning to forecast water quality. Beginning in June, officials used Cann’s model to decide when two of Toronto’s most frequently contaminated beaches should be open to the public and when the water was unsafe.
Almost immediately, the experiment began to go awry. The model regularly declared the beaches safe to swim on days when history or the water’s appearance suggested it was not safe. City officials waved off concerns from residents and a local environmental monitoring group over the discrepancies, arguing that the AI tool was more accurate than traditional testing methods.
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