In my post on tech buzzword panic, I briefly mentioned a situation where Dragon Con bizarrely called the police to expel an exhibitor. Bleeding Cool mentions this situation and a somewhat similar one at Fan Expo Canada:

This led to protests being held at the booth by attending comic book creators, illustrators and other artists, and the police being called. Though remember, these were Canadian police. As one of the protestors, and creator of the Effin’ Birds webcomics and books, Aaron Reynolds, posted to social media afterwards, “Honestly, the police officer was the best and most reasonable person in the entire thing. He understood the issue, asked what we wanted, told us what the show wanted, and brokered us a trade where most people would disperse if he let us talk to the manager of the booth.”

In this case, though, it sounds as if protesters, not the exhibitor, necessitated calling the police. Reynolds admits that the police officer was more reasonable than the protesters. The Now Toronto website doesn’t mention the police incident but indicates that there was no rule against selling AI-generated images and about a quarter of the vendors were selling it. The reports mention assertions that the exhibit used work plagiarized from unspecified artists, but the protests seem directed at the use of AI as such. According to a protester’s description, “the Bell booth takes your photo and uses an AI filter to edit your photo.” Sounds harmless to me and not very different from what you can do in Photoshop.

The two cases, from what the reports indicate, were quite different. Dragon Con seems to have brought in the police for no reason, when they could have just asked the exhibitor to leave. Fan Expo Canada was dealing with a disruptive situation, whether or not anyone was breaking the law. Whether it’s necessary or not, bringing in the police to resolve fannish disputes is a bad sign. There are situations where it’s needed, such as theft or assault; bad people sometimes get into conventions. But these situations weren’t like that.