Public arts funding is not neutral infrastructure — it confers a category judgment. When the Calgary Public Library structured its program as a ten-week paid residency exploring AI in artistic practice, it applied the same institutional frame it uses for human artists in residence. That equivalence is the real provocation. The local artists who objected understood the mechanism: the library was not merely hosting a conversation about AI — it was placing AI-assisted work inside a category of civic recognition that had previously been reserved for human creative labor. That…