Our team submitted expert commentary to the United States White House’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights initiative, which has laid the groundwork for regulatory efforts to assess, manage, and prevent the risks posed by AI in the United States and abroad. Responding to the White House’s Request for Information on biometrics, our submission discussed the implications of AI-driven biometric technologies for human rights law, democracy, and the rule of law, and compiled comparative evidence of human rights harms that have arisen in other national contexts. The submission also set the AI Bill of Rights effort in its global context in light of the “AI arms race” and US companies’ role in normalizing the use of biometric technologies. When the United States Internal Revenue Service announced that it would introduce facial recognition-based identification technologies, we published an op-ed in Slate pointing to the human rights implications of such AI-driven technologies.
During ongoing efforts in Brazil to regulate the development and use of AI, we hosted a virtual event with a member of the expert commission of jurists who had co-drafted the Bill to regulate AI in Brazil, to raise awareness of the Bill among an international audience of human rights scholars and practitioners, and to analyze how human rights law is shaping the legislation. A Brazilian member of our team published an op-ed and additional reading materials after the event.
Our team also submitted an amicus brief in a landmark case in the Dutch High Court that challenged a system that deployed machine learning to detect welfare fraud in low-income neighborhoods in the Netherlands. Our amicus brief drew attention to the discriminatory ways in which this AI system was targeted only at certain communities. We contributed human rights analysis to the court; this was then the first case in which an algorithmic welfare system was struck down on human rights grounds.
