WITNESS continuously hosts journalists, fact-checkers, technologists, policy advocates, creators, human rights defenders and community activists from different parts of the globe to discuss threats and opportunities that deepfakes, generative AI and synthetic media bring to audiovisual witnessing. We seek to identify and prioritize collective responses that can have a positive impact in the information landscape.
Our submission highlighted three issues arising in the context of the technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV): ethical documentation of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), AI-driven SGBV (particularly, looking at the impact of synthetic media, deepfakes, and multimodal generative AI) and the impact of AI-driven SGBV specifically during elections and conflict. We also discussed the gaps in existing human rights responses to TFGBV and presented recommendations on how to address these gaps.
Our submission covers a number of risks with current approaches to AI transparency, including indirect disclosure mechanisms such as watermarking, fingerprinting, and signed metadata. We also highlight the importance of centering the experience of those at the frontlines of human rights and democracy, as well as risks and limitations of current AI detection tools and share what we have learned through our experience working with leading AI detection experts.
WITNESS evidence to the UK Communications and Digital Committee, Lords Select Committee Inquiry into Large Language Models. This submission responds to questions about opportunities and risks over the next three years, and how to address the risk of unintended consequences. It also puts forward a set of recommendations, based on our long standing work with industry, academia and civil society to guard against the risks of large language models.
Our submission to the USA President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) Working Group on Generative AI puts forward a set of recommendations on how to identify and promote the beneficial deployment of generative AI, as well as how to best mitigate risks.
Our submission to the US Office of Science and Technology Policy Request For Information focuses on WITNESS’ recommendations to ensure that global human rights laws and standards are baked into the design, development and deployment of generative AI into societies across the globe.
Our submission to the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) focuses on our guiding principles for developing AI accountability mechanisms, in particular in relation to synthetic media. We provide examples of how watermarking, labelling and provenance technologies can help inform people about how AI tools are operating, and why these approaches need to be grounded in internationally recognized human rights laws and standards.
Large social media platforms are developing tools to detect synthetic media. For these detection tools to be effective, they need to be trained on data that reflects as much as possible real situations. In this advisory opinion to the European Commission, we outline how the DSA can help study and mitigate social media-related risks in human rights crises and conflict.
This submission shares WITNESS’s views on the relationship between human rights and
technical standard-setting processes for new and emerging digital technologies. This document
is shaped by our three decades of experience helping communities advocate for human rights
change to create trustworthy information, to protect themselves against the misuse of their
content, and to challenge misinformation that targets at-risk groups and individuals.