Abstract
Human Rights are highly influences by Artificial intelligence where on one hand it enhances the access to justice, education, healthcare and economic opportunities. It also holds the potential to support financial inclusion and encourage civic participation which makes government actions more transparent. But along with that it comes with certain risk factors that includes discrimination in algorithm decision making, violation of one’s privacy, and also reduce accountability and transparency. The misuse of AI can also cause the violation of freedom of expression and due process. To combat and handle these challenges it is really important to establish a robust legal instrument which deals with the system of AI specifically and ensures transparency and accountability.
Keywords
Artificial Intelligence, Human rights, Data Protection, Surveillance, Algorithm Decision making
Introduction
The power of computers or robots controlled by the computer to perform any task mainly associated with intelligence beings is what is called as artificial intelligence.
AI has a multitude of applications that have already been introduced in the society such as biometric, recognition, success and risk prediction, translations, recommender systems and so on. These factors have made a way for themselves in the sectors including law enforcement, justice, human resource management, etc. Humans basically supervise and coordinate with AI’s learning process, to reinforce good decisions and discourage the bad ones but there are also some AI’s that exists even without any kind of supervision from humans.
With the passing time AI system has improved a lot, their performance regarding specific tasks shows a huge improvement which allows them to integrate new inputs and make decisions without being explicitly programmed do so. AI is all about teaching the machinery to think and learn humans with the aim of self-operating work and solving various problems more efficiently.
Overtime AI became really popular and because of its widespread it can significantly impact the human rights of individual in both negative and positive way. Artificial intelligence does not affect only privacy but there are many other subjects which are getting affected because of AI. Though it has many positive impacts on the society and for the development of any society but with that it has equivalent number of risks which affect humans on a wider scale.
Human rights are the universal and absolute rights that belongs to every human being around the world and no discrimination must be made on the basis on race, caste, gender, religion, nationality or any other status regarding such human rights. These rights include both civil and political rights such as right to life, liberty, privacy as well as economic, social, and cultural rights such as education, health, work, and culture. Many international instruments talk and protects such Human Rights such as Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
AI have made a significant impact on the realization and protection of human rights both as an enabler and as a threat. On the one hand, AI enhances human rights by providing new opportunities and solutions for various challenges such as poverty, disease, discrimination as well as violence. With that AI also helps to improve access to quality education and health care especially for marginalized and vulnerable groups. Social Justice can also be promoted by detecting and improving biases and inequalities in data and decision-making processes.
On the other hand, it also creates many risks and challenges as such surveillance, manipulation, discrimination, and violence. It can collect, analyze and share vast number of sensitive personal data even without the consent or knowledge of the data subject. It can spread manipulation by generating false misleading information which can affect the opinion and behavior of an individual and which sometimes create tension in the society. AI can also enable discrimination and exclusion by generating and increasing existing biases and prejudices in data and algorithms that can result in unfair and harmful outcomes.
Research Methodology
This paper is of descriptive nature and the research is based on secondary sources for the deep analysis of impact of Artificial intelligence on the Human Rights of an individual. Secondary sources of information like journals, websites, research papers are used for the research.
Literature Review
In the present time AI is rapidly transforming our world by showing rapid advancements into various sectors but subsequently it raises certain concerns and one of its main areas of concern is its impact on human rights.
AI has the potential to create a more inclusive society for people with disabilities like there are certain AI powered tools such as speech to text software and visual enhancement which can improve communication and interaction.
But along with positive impacts it simultaneously comes with negative impact like these AI algorithms can preserve existing societal biases if it is trained on biased datasets which can lead to discriminatory outcomes in various areas. It also raises the concern on privacy as its surveillance system can raise concern on privacy intrusion and freedom of expression.
Though AI has the potential to transform the society its deployment might poses various human right challenges. AI systems often require your personal data which raises issues about data security and its potential breach. Sensitive information is also prone to threat because of unauthorized access.
Therefore, AI offers huge potential for progress and development but its deployment must be accompanied with the protection of human rights.
Relation between AI and Human Rights
Human rights can be used as a standard to measure the societal acceptance of AI technology as well as provide certain guidance and identify the barriers. Human Rights are the necessities for the living of any human but it has been questioned with the development of artificial intelligence.
The rapid evolution of AI in the recent years raises serious concerns regarding human rights violation and potential risks. One thing needs to be noted that human himself developed this Artificial intelligence because of the activities of man in order to make these activities easier and faster. Various actors in our society are using AI in order to automate decision making in specific fields of ventures. The designed structure of AI of taking decisions on behalf of man has created many positions as to its impact on human rights and these positions could be negative or positive. AI technically eases every arm of life but sometimes creation of such intelligent system human right violation become easier and the proof of such violation become less rigorous in the courtrooms. This 21st century is known as the “golden age of surveillance” by many states and corporations and even by various non-state actors. Many human rights group or organizations like Syrian Archive or Bellingcat access huge amount of open-source data is generated by billions of sensor platforms around the globe. If we talk about the positive aspect of AI then with the use of AI security of the state can be improved which includes fight against terrorism. For instance, in 2017 International Criminal Court issued a summon in order to arrest Libyan based on the images received from the satellites.
AI as a tool of discrimination
As the AI is developing and becoming popular in our organic society discrimination and racism has become a major issue and due to this it has taken a place in political debates regarding the technological growth. Article 2 of both ICCPR and UDHR both give individual certain rights and freedoms without any kind of discrimination. But it has become difficult to implement this considering the multitude of different and discriminatory opinions of people. Though some think that AI is a solution to this challenge as it is a technological tool that makes us free from the biases of human decision making. The unevaluated bias of these tools has put various people at bigger risk of being perceived as high-risk offenders. This racism which is incorporated in AI decreases its chances of application into the society as it violates the equal treatment and the right to protection.
These AI algorithms and facial recognition system have failed many times in order to ensure the standard of equality. There was a case where Google photos in 2015 categorized the photo of 2 black people as the photos of gorillas.
But still Facial recognition systems as adopted by various countries like China, Denmark, India in its criminal justice system to identify the suspects of predictive policing.
Privacy Challenges in the age of AI
AI turns out to be a huge challenge for the privacy of individuals and organizations because of its complex algorithms. With the advancement of AI, the decisions that are discern to humans AI can make decisions on their behalf with just subtle patterns which means that the personal data of individual are being used even without their knowledge.
Though AI is quite useful in many ways but it also contains several potential risks and one of the primary challenges is the violation of privacy. AI needs vast amount of data which also includes your personal data in order to perform a task but if such data falls into wrong hands, then it can be used for unlawful purposes such as fraud, cyber bullying, etc.
There are many corporations and even government also use AI for the purpose of surveillance which also raises big concerns regarding its breach. As AI generates detailed profile of any individual with the help of the data received from them which also leads to its misuse in many ways like target advertising, etc. The collection of personal data also makes individual a target for hackers which increases the risk of breach of data.
Consent is must while in order to process personal data of an individual but sometimes it becomes a challenging task to so. There is also a lack of transparency specially in those systems which are based on complex algorithms and machine learning which makes it difficult to understand how decisions are taken which makes it harder to ensure accountability.
Sometimes even anonymized data can be re-identified by combining it with some other sources of data which eventually can compromise with the privacy.
It becomes more difficult to ensure privacy because our current legal framework lags behind the technological development which makes it difficult to deal with the challenges related to privacy.
If we look in current scenario then many companies like Facebook, Google, or many more they collect large amount of personal data in order to provide you service or to feed their AI systems which raises concerns regarding the privacy of their customers or users.
There are not just AI programs but also AI powered devices like smart speakers or home assistants and Alexa is one of the major examples of it who collect data from their users about their day to day lives and many times there are not even clear guidelines regarding the data usage and its retention.
Though it can resolve by implementing comprehensive data protection laws which can help in safeguarding the right to privacy of an individual. By developing ethical guidelines for the development of AI can also help in ensuring the use of technology in a responsible way. Also, technologies such as homomorphic encryption and federated learning, investment must be made in such technologies as it helps in mitigate the risk factor of the technology.
Human Rights as top level requirement
The incorporation of Human Rights in AI starts by adopting 4 basic values of EU Charter of Fundamental Rights which are Human dignity, freedom and solidarity.
The foundational value of EU charter is human dignity and is also an important value of human which is at stake because of the AI specially in context to discrimination. As stated in the Charter’s official guiding explanations “individual’s dignity is not just a fundamental right but it became the basis of the fundamental rights in general. Therefore, dignity is considered to be as a complicated concept.
For the violation of dignity there are three categories for the same:
- Humiliation
- Instrumentalization
- Rejection of one’s gift
The impact of AI on dignity can also be seen clearly through the above given dimensions, for example, humiliation can be done through discrimination where one is put into a helpless state.
In relation to individual autonomy Freedom title is an important aspect. Article 6 of Charter of EU provide right to liberty to protect individual from any arbitrary practice. In reference to algorithm system, area which is directly influenced by Article 6 is criminal justice in various ways such as policing system and recidivism. These algorithms help in making predictions as well as judgments based on statistics rather than casual evidences which is a big risk because person may be declared as high risk simply based on the statistics which may be collected earlier which might not even be relevant in the current case. The lack of correlated data and the availability of comparatively cheaper technologies to create personalized knowledge out of the data, which creates new possibilities to manipulate people into behavior without providing proper feedback on how their data have been used.
Article 21 of the charter provides for the right to equality which prohibits any kind of discrimination on the basis of origin, gender, skin color, religion, sexual orientation, disability, etc.
To design such algorithm which are non-discriminatory is very challenging as discrimination even occur even if the individual is put into the equality title. Therefore, designing for equality requires developing a clear understanding of present as well as historical social dynamics because of which discrimination existed in a certain context and the analysis of both social and socio-technical means to address it.
Eventually designing for equality also include designing for privacy to avoid situations where there will be an exposure to your personal data which resulted in unjustified preferential treatment or discrimination.
Solidarity is basically the responsibility of the society members towards each other to combat social exclusion. It recognizes that the ability of an individual to exercise his rights or to uphold its dignity can be compromised in various circumstances such as illness, industrial accidents, etc. In terms of AI, it plays a very important role as operation of algorithm systems are based on statistical relations and they make their decision on the basis of the data collected from the population. In other words, circumstances and experience of an individual does not matter rather the comparison is made with the sample collected from the population in order to make nay decision which is very arbitrary and turns out to be a huge risk for the violation of human rights of an individual.
Legal Framework to Govern AI
AI is so much incorporate in our day to day lives that a person might not be able to differentiate what is self-made or what is AI generated. Despite its rapid evolution, there is a lack of regulatory framework to govern Artificial Intelligence.
In our global society there has not been too much talk about AI’s effect on our Human Rights.
There was an instance of 2018 where social media giant Facebook and its AI driven news feed played an important role in spreading hate speeches which inflicted violence in between the crisis of possibly genocide which clearly indicated that there was a lack of international legal framework in order to deal with the consequences of Artificial Intelligence and keep it under check.
This problem was addresses in many conferences or webinars and Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights webinar of 2020 was one of those where the AI challenges to universal human rights were described.
But there are certain general international and regional human rights instruments which includes ECHR, International Bill of human rights and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights which can be applied in all the areas of life including online and offline regardless of if the technology is used or not. So, eventually they are used in the system of AI. But still currently there is no specific legal framework that specifically deals with artificial intelligence. Though there are certain international legal instrument which partially deal with some aspects of AI indirectly.
Finally, there are certain legal instruments which concern procedural rights such as transparency and access to justice that might be helpful to monitor and safeguard the protection of substantive right, or to address aspects relating to liability for certain harms which might happen because of artificial intelligence.
Suggestions
The impact of AI on human rights is multifaceted including both positive aspect as well as negative aspect. In order to make AI useful and under control there is a need of proper legislation where government should enact comprehensive laws specifically dealing with AI and also which prioritize human rights which ensures transparency, accountability and fairness in the system of AI. Along with legal framework certain ethical guidelines must also be there which sets standard for AI development and deploying.
To promote transparency open algorithms must be promoted where AI algorithms which are used in critical applications like in criminal justice, etc. must be open to scrutiny and independent audits.
Laws related to data protection must be strengthened to protect personal data of individuals from any kind of unauthorized access. And along with that it must also be ensured that the individual has access over their data and they must also be informed how their data is being processed.
AI systems must audit on a regular basis in order to prevent any kind of discrimination or biasness.
To promote accountability such mechanism must be implemented where individual can appeal and seek redressal for content removal decisions which is produced or made by AI. Such AI tools must be created which assists individuals in undertaking their legal rights and accessing legal aid services especially in underserved communities.
Therefore, there are various ways through which AI can be developed and implemented or used in a more efficient way being getting harmful for the society.
Conclusion
The impact of AI on human rights is multifaceted which contains both opportunities as well as challenges. Talking about positive aspect then AI helps in promoting justice, healthcare, education etc. which helps in promoting various public services and will eventually contribute in the overall well being of individual as well as society.
However, with the positive aspect there are significant risks as well which might include biasness, discrimination in AI algorithms, risk to the privacy of an individual because of mass surveillance, there is also a lack of transparency in decision making processes which will eventually infringe individuals’ freedom. Additionally, use of AI in content moderation and law enforcement can undermine freedom of expression if they are not regulated properly.
To combat these risk factor, it is essential to develop such regulatory framework which will promote accountability and transparency, and with that also ensure data privacy by protecting the personal data of an individual from any kind of breach or unauthorized access.
By incorporating human rights in AI development society can take the benefits of AI without any risk and which will ensure a fair and equitable future.
-SHUBHIKA CHAUHAN