22/08/2026
About IA…
“Frustrated with the narratives around AI, experts like Human Right Watch’s tech and human rights director, Frederike Kaltheuner, suggest grounding ourselves in the risks we already know plague AI rather than speculating about what might come.
And there are some clear, well-documented harms posed by the use of AI. They include:
Increased and amplified misinformation. Recommendation algorithms on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube have been shown to prioritize extreme and emotionally compelling content, regardless of accuracy. LLMs contribute to this problem by producing convincing misinformation known as “hallucinations.” (More on that below)
Biased training data and outputs. AI models tend to be trained on biased data sets, which can lead to biased outputs. That can reinforce existing social inequities, as in the case of algorithms that discriminate when assigning people risk scores for committing welfare fraud, or facial recognition systems known to be less accurate on darker-skinned women than white men. Instances of ChatGPT spewing racist content have also been documented.
Erosion of user privacy. Training AI models require massive amounts of data, which is often scraped from the web or purchased, raising questions about consent and privacy. Companies that developed large language models like ChatGPT and Bard have not yet released much information about the data sets used to train them, though they certainly contain a lot of data from the internet.
Kaltheuner says she’s especially concerned generative AI chatbots will be deployed in risky contexts such as mental health therapy: “I’m worried about absolutely reckless use cases of generative AI for things that the technology is simply not designed for or fit for purpose.”
Gebru reiterated concerns about the environmental impacts resulting from the large amounts of computing power required to run sophisticated large language models. (She says she was fired from Google for raising these and other concerns in internal research.) Moderators of ChatGPT, who work for low wages, have also experienced PTSD in their efforts to make model outputs less toxic, she noted.
Regarding concerns about humanity’s future, Kaltheuner asks “Whose extinction? Extinction of the entire human race? We are already seeing people who are historically marginalized being harmed at the moment. That’s why I find it a bit cynical.””
Experts at RightsCon want us to focus less on existential threats, and more on the harms here and now.
