How should civil society engage with the challenges and opportunities created by Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

WACC Global’s No-Nonsense Guide to Communication Rights, Civil Society and Artificial Intelligence identifies several ways in which citizen groups, NGOs, charities, foundations, media, labour unions and faith-based groups who make up civil society can be involved in “processes that are shaping the development of AI.”

Civil society has a role to play in ensuring that “human rights are upheld,” AI is democratized, and its opportunities and challenges are known, the guide states.

The guide, which is free to download, offers an overview of AI, cites areas where AI is already having an impact, and identifies the human rights, ethical and social justice questions arising from the use of AI.

AI is “increasingly becoming more central in a wide range of fields,” the guide notes, including financial and insurance services; manufacturing, agriculture and work; governance and policy processes; sustainable development, and geopolitics.

This, says the guide, raises many questions, such as: How do we ensure that the right to privacy is held, given the vast amounts of data being collected? Is it possible to embed human rights into the algorithms and AI tools processing data? Is it possible to “translate” human rights into computer code? How do we deal with biases embedded in AI algorithms and data?

“Our hope is that this guide will serve as an introduction to some of the basic human rights, social justice, and ethical questions related to AI and AI-related technologies, especially for grassroots civil society organizations that are beginning to think about they ways to engage with these issues”, said Lorenzo Vargas, WACC’s programme manager for Communication for Social Change.