IT for Change's Executive Director Anita Gurumurthy and Research Associate Merrin Muhammad Ashraf submitted a response to the Office of the Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology's (OSET) AI Risk Pulse Check survey as part of a horizon-scanning exercise on AI. The purpose of the Pulse check is to understand AI risks globally, as well as fine tune methodologies for assessing expert perceptions of AI risks. Results from this exercise will be shared with the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence, which will produce a report in mid-2024 on the global governance of AI.
The response unpacks the significance of emergent trends, pace of technical change and adoption, data governance, and marginalized voices in the assessment of AI harms. It crucially highlights that data governance and AI governance should be seen as two sides of the same coin; where if data-sharing legal frameworks are not fair and equitable, public sets and data pools are at risk of being locked up in the name of AI innovations by private actors, with little benefit accruing to the community whose data is thus locked up.
Read the full text of the response here.