QUÉBEC - Quebec Premier François Legault replaced his cybersecurity and digital technology minister Friday after a scandal with the auto insurance board's online platform forced the resignation of Éric Caire.

Legault named backbencher Gilles Bélanger as Caire's replacement, after an explosive report by the province’s auditor general last week revealed cost overruns of at least $500 million in the creation of the online platform known as SAAQclic.

Bélanger, first elected in the Orford riding in 2018, has been legislature assistant to Legault and to Finance Minister Eric Girard. Notably, after the Coalition Avenir Québec won its first mandate in 2018, Bélanger was responsible for the deployment of high-speed internet in rural areas.

"He's a seasoned businessman," Legault told reporters Friday after Bélanger was sworn in at the office of Lt-Gov. Manon Jeannotte.

OTTAWA - More than a quarter of Canadians — 28 per cent — consider artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT reliable sources of information, a new survey suggests.

Among generation Z Canadians — those born between 1997 and 2012 — 41 per cent say they see AI systems as reliable information sources. That’s not far off from the 49 per cent of gen Z respondents who said they trust stories on news media websites, according to the annual CanTrust Index published by Proof Strategies.

The high level of trust in AI's reliability among gen Z respondents appears to be driven by younger males. More than half of gen Z males polled — 54 per cent — expressed a high level of trust in search results from large language models and platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

"Time will tell if it's OK to trust AI. Certainly now people need to take a skeptical approach and do lots of fact checking," said Proof Strategies chair Bruce MacLellan.

OTTAWA - The battle between AI companies and copyright holders notched an early win for publishers in the U.S. in mid-February when a court ruled that a legal research firm didn't have the right to use a rival's content.

But even as the number of legal cases grows, a definite answer to the question of whether artificial intelligence companies can use copyrighted content to train their AI products is still a long way off.

"We’ve been having this conversation for quite some time already," said Carys Craig, a professor at York University’s law school who specializes in intellectual property. "But it’s still early days."

"There's a lot of things going on at the same time, and it's not clear at all where all these balls in the air are actually going to land."

With a plane sitting upside-down on the tarmac at the Toronto airport, Anne Robinson remained pragmatic about the slim chance she could end up in a similar crash.

"Deep down, it does (scare me), but it's not going to stop me," Robinson said Tuesday after her flight out of Toronto Pearson International Airport was cancelled due to the crash.

Similar trepidation over air travel is likely in the weeks ahead, says one psychologist, as several high-profile plane accidents have been in the news in recent weeks.

"A lot of people will suddenly be thinking, 'Oh, maybe this is a much more dangerous form of travel than I realized,' and it probably really isn't," said Steve Joordens, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto.