The AI Action Summit, held in Paris this week, resulted in 60 signatories supporting a statement on “inclusive and sustainable artificial intelligence for people and the planet.”
Among the dozens of countries are the European Union and the African Union Commission, along with Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany – but not the US or the UK.
The gathering in France brought together representatives of governments, international organizations, civil society, academics, researchers, and, the private sector.
The declaration commits to a number of UN initiatives, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), that are routinely criticized for ushering in censorship and surveillance. Some of the other international initiatives cited are the UNESCO Recommendation on Ethics of AI and a number of UN General Assembly resolutions.
But the document signed in Paris talks about reinforced international cooperation and better coordinated international governance as main priorities, while also worryingly (given how “information integrity” is often used as a “code word” for censorship) pledging to “keep addressing the risks of AI to information integrity.”
In order to strengthen joint work on “public and private” AI initiatives, those backing the declaration launched the Public Interest AI Platform and Incubator.
When it comes to the endorsement of the UN’s SDGs, and how that may stand in the way of free speech, it’s worth remembering that this set of 17 interconnected global goals promotes not only digital ID, but also indirectly censorship of what the authorities find to be “threats to information integrity” that can negatively impact SDGs – such as “hate speech,” “misinformation,” etc.
Another UN initiative referred to by the Paris Declaration in the Global Digital Compact, which the signatories agreed is the basis for launching a Global Dialogue on AI governance and the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, as a way to “align ongoing governance efforts.”
The Global Digital Compact is one of the annexes to the UN’s Pact for the Future, prominently pushing digital ID (via what the UN, the EU, the WEF, and the Gates Foundation like to call, digital public infrastructure, DPI), as well as a number of censorship and surveillance policies, tied to “countering and addressing” things considered “hate speech,” “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “cyberbullying.”
The Pact for the Future, while claiming privacy safeguards are built in, also promotes greater “cross-border data flows (sharing).”
