A Human Rights Assessment of the Generative AI Value Chain

Authors

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  Hannah Darnton

  Director, Technology and Human Rights, BSR

  

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  Hannah Darnton

  Director, Technology and Human Rights, BSR

  

  San Francisco

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  Hannah works with multinational companies to align business and human rights strategies and facilitate incorporation of sustainable practices into business operations across sectors.

  She focuses on the intersection of human rights and new, disruptive technology and leads the Tech Against Trafficking collaborative initiative.

  Prior to joining BSR, Hannah worked with the Skoll Foundation, where she co-led the portfolio and investments team’s efforts to identify social entrepreneurs with the potential to drive large-scale social change. Her work led to over US$20 million in grants and investments between 2015 and 2018. Before Skoll, Hannah spent six years working in anti-human trafficking in West Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Bay Area. She is fluent in French.

  Hannah holds a Master’s in NGOs and Development from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in Political Science and French from the University of Michigan. She currently serves on the advisory boards of Oxfam’s Women in Small Enterprise initiative and Convening17.

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  Lindsey Andersen

  Associate Director, Human Rights, BSR

  

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  Lindsey Andersen

  Associate Director, Human Rights, BSR

  

  San Francisco

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  Lindsey works at the intersection of technology and human rights, helping both tech and non-tech companies identify and address human rights impacts associated with the development and use of technology and effectively incorporate business and human rights practices. Her focus areas include content governance, end-use risks of tech products and services, and the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies.

  Prior to joining BSR, Lindsey worked with digital rights organization Access Now to drive the conversation on the human rights implications of AI. As part of this, she wrote the foundational report Human Rights in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Lindsey previously worked at Internews, implementing a large portfolio of internet freedom projects across Latin America, which focused on equipping journalists and human rights defenders with digital security skills and defending the free and open internet. Lindsey has worked and lived across Latin America and is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese.

  Lindsey holds a Master’s in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University and a BA in Political Science and International Studies from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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  J.Y. Hoh

  Manager, Technology Sectors, BSR

  

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  J.Y. Hoh

  Manager, Technology Sectors, BSR

  

  Singapore

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  J.Y. works with technology companies to incorporate effective human rights practices.

  Before joining BSR, J.Y. worked as an international human rights lawyer at NGOs. He was previously a Legal Officer at the Centre for Law and Democracy, an international human rights NGO promoting freedom of expression and the right to information globally. Before that, he was a Staff Lawyer at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Canada’s national human rights organization, where he was a recipient of the Law Foundation of Ontario’s Public Interest Articling Fellowship. He also acted as an international trade negotiator for the government of Singapore and was part of the negotiating team that closed the EU-Singapore Free Trade Agreement.

  J.Y. holds a BA in Law from the University of Oxford, Somerville College and a LLM (International Law) from the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

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• Samone Nigam

  Manager, Technology and Human Rights, BSR

  

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  Samone Nigam

  Manager, Technology and Human Rights, BSR

  

  San Francisco

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  Samone works with BSR member companies in human rights and technology, with a focus on the impact of technologies on marginalized communities.

  Prior to joining BSR, Samone conducted research for a variety of agencies including the World Wide Web Foundation, UN Women, and the Office of the NYC Public Advocate. Her research takes a social justice focus informed by her experience in the nonprofit sector working directly with underrepresented populations like the LGBTQI+ community, immigrants and asylum seekers, sex workers, survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault, and people seeking safe abortion.

  Samone holds a master’s degree in human rights from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a bachelor’s degree in community studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Key Points

• BSR is launching a public Human Rights Assessment of Generative AI across the value chain in 2024.
• The Assessment will cover the “why”, “how”, and “what” of integrating human rights approaches into company workflows on GenAI governance.
• BSR will be engaging with experts and stakeholders over the next few months to inform this work.

Recent advancements in generative AI (GenAI) have accelerated the benefits and risks of the technology. Although publicly available tools were launched just over a year ago, a recent survey found 22% of employees are already using them at work. While early models such as GPT-2 only worked with text, new models like Gemini and GPT-4 are multimodal: they can simultaneously process and understand different types of inputs, including text, images, and sounds. Such features improve product performance but also create human rights risks, including new ways to produce harmful content, conduct surveillance, or carry out cyberattacks.

To help companies identify, prioritize, and mitigate these risks and maximize opportunities, BSR will be conducting a sector-wide human rights assessment (HRA) of GenAI over the coming months. The assessment will identify human rights risks across the value chain of GenAI, from upstream data workers to model developers and end-users, and make recommendations on how to address these risks.

The Human Rights Assessment will be informed by interviews with leading companies that develop and deploy GenAI and with a broad range of stakeholders, such as civil society organizations, intergovernmental organizations, and academics. The assessment will also draw on diverse research sources, including industry papers, academic literature, and NGO reports. 

The HRA will use the proven and internationally recognized methodology provided by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) to provide practical guidance for companies on how to identify, prioritize, and mitigate GenAI-associated risks. The HRA will specify how GenAI developers and deployers can integrate that methodology into existing AI governance workflows, such as model evaluations, impact assessments, and institutional review boards.

To align existing processes and frameworks, the HRA will also explore how rights-based approaches can complement the ethics or trust and safety-based approaches that dominate current industry practice. Company-specific AI Principles have already helped to ground responsible AI product development and deployment in good practice, but integrating rights-based approaches will help companies better meet their commitments by ensuring methodological consistency across the industry. It will provide a more comprehensive understanding of risk that focuses on impacted stakeholders (“rightsholders”), particularly the most vulnerable. 

The HRA is coming at an important inflection point in the responsible AI field. Stakeholders are increasingly emphasizing the importance of a rights-based approach to responsible and safe AI, while the EU’s provisional agreement on the AI Act includes a mandatory obligation to assess high-risk AI systems for impacts on human rights (fundamental rights impact assessments (FRIA).

Civil society stakeholders, many of whom lobbied for the inclusion of FRIAs into the AI Act, continue to call for a rights-based approach to AI governance, but there is a lack of public analysis and resources that show companies how to take a human rights based approach to AI in practice. We aim to help fill that gap. 

The HRA will build on BSR’s existing work on GenAI and human rights with a variety of companies, as well as our recent collaborations with the B-Tech project of the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (foundational paper on the value proposition of the UNGPs, overview of current company practice, GenAI human rights risk taxonomy) and our FAQ on the ethics and human rights implications of GenAI.

We’ll coordinate closely with peers undertaking related research and analysis on the responsible design, development, and deployment of GenAI to ensure the HRA complements rather than duplicates other work. We’ll also engage with a broad group of experts and stakeholders to inform our analysis. 

We aim to publish the HRA and accompanying practical guidance for companies in Q3 of 2024. We look forward to contributing to the vibrant public debate on generative AI and producing helpful, practical resources for the public domain.

For more information on this project please reach out to Hannah Darnton (hdarnton@bsr.org) and Lindsey Andersen (landersen@bsr.org).