Years ago I learned that Eleanor Roosevelt was instrumental in helping come up with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and I feel that it’s worth reminding people of that, given the current situation. “Widowed in 1945, she served as a United States Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1945 to 1952, and took a leading role in designing the text and gaining international support for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.
The European Union, African Union and others released a communiqué. ‘The communique states that priorities include “ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy, taking into account international frameworks for all” and “making AI sustainable for people and the planet’. It goes further. “The document was backed by 60 other signatories on Tuesday, including France, China, India, Japan, Australia and Canada.” The odd ones out are the United Kingdom and United States and that is where Eleanor Roosevelt comes in.
There was a time, decades long, if not centuries, when the US led in the protection of Human Rights. I feel that it is important for the US not to forget that they were at the forefront of Human Rights advocacy at one time and that they should not lose Eleanor Rossevelt’s efforts"She possessed not only a passionate commitment to human rights, but a hard-earned knowledge of the political and cultural obstacles to securing them in a divided world."
Niche AI
Whilst ChatGPT and similar AI projects are extremely interesting in their ability to do everything there is also a larger niche for specialist AI that can run on a PI, or a mobile phone. AI can be trained for domain specific tasks, and thus take less funds, and resources to train. Ai can be specialist, rather than general purpose.
Big Data and the Manufacturing of Content
Noam Chomsky wrote about the manufacturing of consent, and specifically about paying attention to newspaper headlines to see what was talked about and what was glossed over, in shaping what people thought about and how they felt. Chris Whiley in Mindf*ck wrote about Cambridge Analytica and how big data could be used to find people with malleable minds, to get them to vote one way, rather than another. Read their books for more depth on the topics.
Europe and Other Nations are Defending Human Rights
The US moved to ban TikTok despite it being what I like to call a talentless show, despite Facebook being a far greater threat to democracy, and then panicked when it saw Deepseek. The US is very fast to want to regulate anything that is American, but blind to the goodwill that every other nation needs to show in use ChatGPT, Facebook, Bluesky and other products.
If the global and international community behaved towards the US like the US behaves to everyone else then the US would lose it’s footing on the pedestal that it is currently on.
The Writers Guild
The backlash that ChatGPT and US based AI projects have encountered is because they have misappropriated data without due care and attention to copyright law and more. For months the Writers guild protested against AI because it is moving fast and breaking things, including good will and trust.
What countries and continents want, via Paris is for an ethical and moral AI collaborative effort that takes Human Rights, needs and requirements into account to ensure that checks and balances are in place so that AI is incremental and constructive.