From using artificial intelligence (AI) to determine credit scores to using AI to determine whether a defendant or criminal may offend again, AI-based tools are increasingly being used by people and organizations in positions of authority to make important, often life-altering decisions. But how do these instances impact human rights, such as the right to equality before the law, and the right to an education?
A new report from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (BKC) addresses this issue and weighs the positive and negative impacts of AI on human rights through six "use cases" of algorithmic decision-making systems, including criminal justice risk assessments and credit scores. Whereas many other reports and studies have focused on ethical issues of AI, the BKC report is one of the first efforts to analyze the impacts of AI through a human rights lens, and proposes a new framework for thinking about the impact of AI on human rights. The report was funded, in part, by the Digital Inclusion Lab at Global Affairs Canada.
"One of the things I liked a lot about this project and about a lot of the work we're doing [in the Algorithms and Justice track of the Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative] is that it's extremely current and tangible. There are a lot of far-off science fiction scenarios that we're trying to think about, but there's also stuff happening right now," says Professor Christopher Bavitz, the WilmerHale Clinical Professor of Law, Managing Director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at BKC, and senior author on the report. Bavitz also leads the Algorithms and Justice track of the BKC project on the Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, which developed this report.
The authors are able to assess the impact of AI on human rights in each use case by identifying the human rights implications of the systems that predated the introduction of AI, and contrasting this finding with how AI is changing human rights implications of the current situation. Among others, a few of the human rights evaluated in the report are the right to freedom from discrimination, the right to education, and the right to an adequate living standard. Levin Kim, an author on the report, also spearheaded the creation of a visualization that illustrates the connections between the rights and use cases studied. The results of the analysis aren't always clear-cut, however.
Credit: Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society	Levin Kim, an author on the report, spearheaded the creation of an interactive visualization that illustrates the connections between the rights and use cases studied.
"It was striking to me that there are profound distributive effects; for every single one of our use cases, we could identify rights holders that were positively impacted by AI, and other rights holders who were negatively impacted, often on the same right. That indeterminacy was really interesting, that was not what I expected," says Vivek Krishnamurthy, an author on the report and an affiliate at BKC.
For an illustrative example, look at the human rights impacts of using AI to decide whether to extend credit to an individual. On the one hand, the increase of available data for use in credit scoring may ultimately harm some individuals by perpetuating biases and discrimination. For others, such as individuals in developing countries who lack a long trail of traditional credit data, these AI systems afford access to credit that may otherwise have been unavailable.
One benefit of looking at the contextual environment prior to deploying AI in each area, as the report does, is that it highlights the preexisting conditions that might otherwise have been misattributed to AI, the authors point out.
This mindset also offers a chance to reflect on these institutional systems. "The introduction of AI into these [existing systems] presents a unique opportunity to reassess the values we are institutionalizing. If we have the chance to make the system more fair, or to enhance a specific right for more people by using AI, should we? And can we do that within the existing legal framework?" asks Hannah Hilligoss, also an author on the paper.
The BKC team based their evaluation of the human rights impacts of AI on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP).
Since many AI tools are developed through private industry, the authors emphasize that businesses involved in the creation and deployment of AI should conduct due diligence as mandated by the UNGP, and respect the human rights that are enshrined in the UDHR.
As part of that reflection, the team hopes its report's framework will be useful for thinking through the potential risks and benefits.
"I think that the human rights framework is a very useful way for thinking about social consequences of business activities. I would be gratified if that existing framework, which is so powerful, is used by private sectors in deploying systems," Krishnamurthy says.