The UN’s recent report on the human rights risks connected to generative AI is a wake-up call to the potential threats that this technology poses to our fundamental rights. The report highlights 10 human rights that are at risk of being negatively impacted, including freedom from physical and psychological harm, right to privacy, and freedom of expression. The report emphasizes that the most significant harms to people related to generative AI are in fact impacts on internationally agreed human rights. It provides over 50 examples of potential human rights violations, ranging from the use of generative AI in armed conflict to its potential to create harmful content, including political disinformation and nonconsensual pornography.
One of the most striking aspects of the report is its focus on the rights of children, who are especially susceptible to human rights harms linked to generative AI. The report notes that children are less capable of discerning between synthetic content and genuine content, identifying inaccurate information, and understanding that they are interacting with a machine. This is a critical issue, as children are already vulnerable to the negative effects of social media, and the last thing we need is to repeat the same mistakes with generative AI.
The report also explores the impact of generative AI on the right to work and to gain a living, highlighting the potential for employers to use generative AI to monitor workers and the exploitative nature of data labeling work required to create large language models. The report makes it clear that these potential human rights violations are not inevitable, but depend on our own implementation of the technology and what guardrails we put around it.
