Studies examining the effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on a myriad of human activities are now commonplace, exploring how the seemingly unstoppable advance of the technology into our lives has affected everything from plagiarism rates to employment, from medical diagnoses to driving.
The study’s lead author, Maria Randazzo, an academic from the university’s School of Law, says it found that AI is reshaping Western legal and ethical landscapes at an unprecedented speed while undermining democratic values and deepening systemic biases.
With AI’s creators doing little to address the issue—and new iterations of some large language models (LLMS) seemingly making it worse—it falls to lawmakers to rein in its worst excesses.
However, Randazzo argues that current regulations fail to prioritise fundamental human rights and freedoms, such as privacy, anti-discrimination, user autonomy, and intellectual property rights, largely due to the untraceable nature of many algorithmic models, which big tech companies view as proprietary intellectual property.
Decisions made by deep-learning or machine-learning processes were impossible for users to trace, making it difficult for them to determine if and why an AI model has violated their rights and dignity and seek justice where necessary.
She calls this situation a “black box problem” because no one outside the tech companies knows what goes on inside the box.
“This is a very significant issue that is only going to get worse without adequate regulation,” Randazzo said.
“AI is not intelligent in any human sense at all. It is a triumph in engineering, not in cognitive behaviour. It has no clue what it’s doing or why—there’s no thought process as a human would understand it, just pattern recognition stripped of embodiment, memory, empathy, or wisdom.”
Currently, the world’s three dominant digital powers—the United States, China, and the European Union—are taking markedly different approaches to AI, leaning on market-centric, state-centric, and human-centric models, respectively.
Randazzo believes the EU’s human-centric approach is the best way to protect human dignity; however, without a global commitment to this goal, even this approach falls short.
“Globally, if we don’t anchor AI development to what makes us human—our capacity to choose, to feel, to reason with care, to empathy and compassion—we risk creating systems that devalue and flatten humanity into data points, rather than improve the human condition,” she said.
“Humankind must not be treated as a means to an end.”
