Greetings, and happy Wednesday from the AI & Human Rights newsletter.
Let’s kick things off with a blog round up. EJIL:Talk! has a good summary of the recent UN General Assembly resolution on AI, while Opinio Juris have a full scale symposium on the use of AI by the military. Will definitely be taking the time to read through that.
There are also quite a few stories on the use of AI in healthcare, prompting one of the more unusual headlines of the week. Ye can peruse below at your leisure.
There is a good feature piece on the global use of facial recognition in the context of protests. Importantly, it offers a more global perspective than most – with case studies on Russia, India and Iran – highlights the chilling effects, and really gets across how disastrous facial recognition can be for the expression of dissent.
Continuing the dystopian theme, The Guardian have a piece on Israel’s use of AI in Gaza, which apparently identified up to 37,000 potential targets at one point (individuals, not buildings etc.). The reporting is based on a more in-depth report, published at 972 mag. The underlying report details how targets are identified on the basis of a form of pattern of life analysis, where behaviours or patterns similar to known fighters are flagged. There are obviously huge issues involved in running AI-based target selection systems but the report also raises other law of armed conflict issues, including around where the proportionality threshold is set. The Financial Times has a long read on Silcon Valley’s ‘Oppenheimer’, and the trade in AI weapons systems. In totally unrelated news, Hell Gate have a piece on how AI-based weapons scanners in NYC returned a quite astonishing 85% false positive rate.
The random is it AI or not AI tests are back, this time from the Washington Post.
This week I’ve been listening to ‘House of my Soul (You Light the Rooms)‘ a lot, because I quite like it.
Hope you all have a lovely week.
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Rest of World, How governments use facial recognition for protest surveillance
Hell Gate, NYC Has Tried AI Weapons Scanners Before. The Result: Tons of False Positives
The Register, Singapore improves the AI it uses to detect smokers
Financial Times, How Silicon Valley’s ‘Oppenheimer’ found lucrative trade in AI weapons
Washington Post, Ready or not, self-driving semi-trucks are coming to America’s highways
Financial Times, Shoplifting, self-checkout and the limits of AI
Washington Post, Is this AI? See if you can spot the technology in your everyday life.
The Guardian, Worried about a bump on your date’s penis? There’s an app for that
WIRED, How to Resist the Temptation of AI When Writing | WIRED
The Guardian, Sepsis blood test combined with AI could offer early detection tool
AJMC, FDA Approves First AI Tool for Earlier Heart Failure Detection
The Register, Belgian beer study acquires taste for machine learning
The Register, BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who
The Guardian, AI ‘apocalypse’ could take away almost 8m jobs in UK, says report
Washington Post, Why the Justice Department is taking on Apple’s iPhone
The Conversation, How AI and a popular card game can help engineers predict catastrophic failure – by finding the absence of a pattern
Financial Times, Future of AI (special report)
European Commission, Commission publishes guidelines under the DSA for the mitigation of systemic risks online for elections
Algorithm Watch, EU’s AI Act fails to set gold standard for human rights
Defense One, The Navy is using robot ships to deter human smuggling out of Haiti – Defense One
Blog Posts
Opino Juris, Symposium on Military AI and the Law of Armed Conflict: Introduction
EJIL:Talk!, The First United Nations General Assembly Resolution on Artificial Intelligence
Academic Literature
*Disclaimer: The following articles, chapters, and books have not been evaluated for their methodology and do not necessarily reflect the views of the AI & Human Right Blog
Harry Surden, ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Large Language Models, and Law
Leandry Jieutsa et al, Deployment of digital technologies in African cities: emerging issues and policy recommendations for local governments
Paivi Seppala et al, AI and discriminate decisions in recruitment: challenging the core assumptionsFelipe Romero Moreno, Generative AI and deepfakes: A human rights approach to tackling harmful content