AI and Human Rights
How artificial intelligence systems affect fundamental rights, from algorithmic bias to automated decision-making.
AI's Rights Footprint
Artificial intelligence systems increasingly make decisions that affect people's lives: who gets a loan, who gets hired, who gets released on bail, who gets flagged for additional security screening, whose social media posts are seen or suppressed. When these systems embed biases, produce errors, or operate without transparency, they can violate fundamental rights including non-discrimination, due process, privacy, and freedom of expression.
The COMPAS recidivism algorithm, used in US criminal courts to predict the likelihood of reoffending, was found by ProPublica to be biased against Black defendants, scoring them as higher risk than white defendants with similar criminal histories. Amazon's AI hiring tool, trained on historical data, taught itself to penalize resumes that included the word 'women's' because the training data reflected decades of male-dominated hiring. These are not isolated failures but structural features of systems trained on biased data.
