Select Committee Calls for Bill to Address AI Threat to Human Rights – BBC News
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Cross-Party Committee Identifies AI’s Human Rights Risks
A cross-party group of MPs and peers has identified human rights risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) which existing laws, they argue, are ill-equipped to cover.
The Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) published a report calling for a new bill on AI to "address the scale and seriousness" of such threats.
"Nowhere in the world, including the UK, has a current legislative and regulatory approach to AI that is fit for purpose," said Alex Sobel MP, the committee’s chair.
On Saturday, the head of the US AI company Anthropic, Dario Amodei, proposed a plan that includes global regulation, industry-wide regulation, and independent monitoring of AI models as they are developed. Amodei urged the pace of development to be slowed down, a view shared by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
Concerns and Examples
One human rights concern raised is AI displaying biases against specific groups if trained on large datasets scraped from the internet containing racist, sexist, and other undesirable material.
AI could also be used to create and spread misinformation.
The JCHR’s 100-page report summarizes these concerns, citing examples such as:
- The use of AI to create sexualized images of women and girls.
- Scanning people’s faces without their consent.
Proposed Solutions
The JCHR advocates the creation of a "single, independent AI oversight body… on a statutory basis." They argue for:
- A "regulatory regime" classifying different risk levels and mandating stricter obligations for higher-risk AI systems.
- Obligations placed on all stages of the AI lifecycle.
- Prohibiting certain AI uses incompatible with human rights, such as subliminal techniques and inappropriate use of profiling or biometric data.
"AI is heralded as an unprecedented era of technological development… Its impact is hard to accurately predict," said Sobel. “What is clear is that at present we are unprepared to deal with its consequences however potentially dire they may be."
The 12 members of the JCHR, drawn from both Houses of Parliament, currently include MPs and peers from the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat parties. BBC News is seeking comment from the government on the call for an AI bill.
