The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
***
>> ANNOUNCER: Please welcome to the stage, the moderator, Elizabeth Orembo, Research Fellow, Research ICT Africa.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am trying to look at my time to be correct that it's not after noon. Thank you for being here, and thank you to our remote participants who are joining us from various locations. This is going to be a Policy Network on AI topic. And you are going to discuss the role of PNAI network within the ecosystem of IGF.
But before I go on to introduce this panel, let me welcome my fellow panelists, who are Mario Nobile, Director General, AgID Agency for Digital Italy.
We have Paloma Lara-Castro, Policy Director, Derechos Digitales.
We also have William Bird, Director, Media Monitoring Africa.
And we have Shuyan Wu, Deputy Director, User and Market Research, China Mobile Institute.
Before we start this panel, we will have a small presentation to talk to us about what is PNAI about, and that will be Shamira Ahmed, Founder and Executive Director, Data Economic Policy Hub of Africa.
Welcome, my panelists, to the stage.
Thank you, everyone. I decided to cross the floor here because that was a bit far from you, and I want this session to be very, very interactive. Like I had started introducing what this panel is going to be about, it's some sort of a discussion about what the PNAI is about and its role in the Internet Governance, as well as AI governance ecosystem, given that there's a lot of policy processes happening globally within different multilateral systems, regional blocks, and even at national level.
So, we are going to discuss the role of PNAI on those levels, what PNAI is about, the capacity building it does, research, and all that.
So, this is going to be the structure of our session, because it's not just a dialogue, but it's also a feedback mechanism where we discuss amongst the panelists and also amongst the audience that we have here, as well as the remote participation that we have, on what's going to be the role of PNAI also moving forward.
So, we are going to have a five minutes' introduction of what PNAI is about. And then afterwards, we are going to have a 30 minutes' discussion with the panel that we have, each of us are going to share the 30 minutes. And then we are going to have a Mentimeter questionnaire. It's going to be shown on the screen. So, prepare your phones. I hope your phones are charged so that we start having the interactions through the Mentimeter.
And then afterwards, we will have questions and answers from the participants and from the panel itself.
And then, lastly, we will share a survey with you, which we will ask you to participate in the questions that PNAI is asking about how it's going to shape its role going forward.
So, before the panelists, let me give it to Shamira Ahmed to introduce us to PNAI and what it's about. Thanks.
>> SHAMIRA AHMED: Thanks, Liz.
So, my name is Shamira Ahmed. And I am the Executive Director of the Data Economy Policy Hub, the DEP, and it's the first think tank that's founded by an indigenous woman from South Africa. I'm honored to present the work of the PNAI. It's a global bottom-up that's hosted by the IGF. At its core, the PNAI is dedicated to facilitating open, inclusive, multidisciplinary dialogue on governance. And we prioritize elevating diverse voices, particularly from the Global South, to be involved and promote meaningful international cooperation, grounded in multidimensional challenges that are often avoided in many other AI governance forums. And some of the discussions we highlight are human dignity into sectional equity, mental well-being and environmental protection.
In a practical sense, PNAI operates through an open, collaborative process and we do this through our various multistakeholder working groups, but aim to transform community insights into concrete recommendations and policy briefs.
We also ensure regular engagement through online meetings from town halls, consultations, and other forms of collaborative participation to ensure that our insights and our outputs genuinely reflect a wide range of perspectives.
In terms of our achievements to date, we have two major milestones that we have developed since our inception. The first one was the development and presentation of our 2023 report that represented at the 2023 IGF in Tokyo entitled "Strengthening the Multistakeholder Approach to Global AI Governance, Protecting the Environment and Human Rights in the Era of Generative AI."
The report identified good practices for AI governance, it emphasized the need for transparency, fairness, and accountability, and highlighted the importance of environmental sustainability and human rights in the age of generative AI.
Our second milestone was the 2024 report, which was presented at last year's IGF in Riyadh, and this policy brief deepened our focus on our four priority areas. We focused mainly on AI governance, interoperability, and good practices, environmental sustainability throughout the AI value chain, and labour issues and the socioeconomic impact of AI.
We also highlighted the liability and accountability frameworks that are necessary for inclusive and sustainable global AI governance.
Looking ahead, we aim to develop a policy brief this year which will further advance the themes I mentioned and that we have done previously and respond to multidimensional emerging challenges that take place in this dynamic space.
Beyond our reports, as I mentioned, PNAI has organized multiple interactive sessions where we have brought together stakeholders from government, civil society, academia and the private sector to share perspectives, co-create knowledge products, and build capacity for responsible global AI governance.
PNAI serves as an open platform for co-creating meaningful dialogue, knowledge exchange and policy innovation. As a community, we are committed to ensuring that AI is developed and governed in ways that are ethical, inclusive, and beneficial to all.
So, I invite you to join in our network if you want to be part of a global collective. I invite you all to engage with our work, contribute your expertise and help us shape a future way AI serves the public interest for all people and the planet, now and in the future. Thank you.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thank you, Shamira Ahmed, for that introduction of PNAI as an initiative within the IGF looking at AI governance. It's a Policy Network on AI governance.
Now to discuss -- to discuss some of the things that we are going to discuss on this panel, I'd like to remind the participants that there's translation, if you have the translation gadgets. And that's because Shuyan Wu is going to respond to the questions in Chinese. So, just get ready for that.
To Shuyan Wu, just to set the stage for this discussion and to understand the context in which PNAI exists, I'd like you to tell us what are those risks that your concerned with from your research centre about the global and even national and even regional risk that you are concerned with, and how can regulation as well as PNAI address these risks?
>> SHUYAN WU: Okay. Thank you very much. Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to attend this session to discuss with you. I want to focus on the IGF and PNAI's role in global governance and also under the context with current AI development, which focus areas should we work on. We know that PNAI is an important platform for international AI governance, is promotes inclusive and capacity building and has great advantages. It has a bottom-up model which encourages the participation of multistakeholders and also PNAI is multistakeholder platforms. It focuses on the hot topics to gather the consensus on AI development.
You know that AI development is stoppable because of the iteration of innovation, the adoption of AI technology is widespread. But it also brings uncertainties. At the moment we see misinformation and information leakage and also the digital divide which are the areas of concerns for international community.
No single country or body can deal with those challenges. We have to work together to tackle all these risks and challenges. So, I believe that IGF and INI will play a crucial role and there will be increasingly important.
As to the areas of focus, I think that's intelligent divide is one of the focus areas, because innovation would come with uncertainties. At the moment AI technology is growing fast. It has brought a lot of benefits. But at the moment, how to minimize or mitigate the intelligent divides before it grows wider, I think this is an important topic the international I governance should face. We think intelligence divide would involve access and governance.
In September 2024, the GDC also mentioned that we need to promote the multistakeholder model to tackle the challenges, how to set up the rules and how to formulate the pathway and use the advantages of the multistakeholder model to learn from the best practice and also strengthen communication with other platforms, I think that's what IGF need to focus on currently and in the future.
How to play the platform value of IGF and PNAI, I would touch on a few areas. First, we need to strengthen dialogue mechanism to organize the public sector, the private sector, academia, and other stakeholders to have across these plenary dialogues. And also when to share more, we can set up database, user case, and to promote experience sharing, and we can try to have improved collaborative model.
Third, we need to implement the GDC together. We need to use the regional and the national strength to promote objectives of GDI.
That concludes my thoughts. Thank you.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thank you, Shuyan Wu, and you have really touched on very important topics, on not just digital divide, but also intelligence divide, and also the need for PNAI also to have an impact to then the GDC process, and these are the AI policy development processes that are currently happening, which is a discussion that the other panelists are going to talk about.
But before we move there, let me turn to Mario Nobile from Italy. If you can speak on the context of Italy, as well as tell us some of your national and also regional progress on AI and how PNAI fits into this national and regional context, how can it support some of these processes at that level.
>> MARIO NOBILE: Thank you. Is Nobile, not in English Nobile, but it's the same. It's Mario Nobile. Yes. And well, I think that talking about AI governance, we need first to understand the position of our ship in this big ocean and in the current context.
Also for the hype generated by some CEOs, for purely commercial reasons, some argue that if you say hello or thank you or you are welcome to a chatbot, you can improve its response. But until the artificial general intelligence is developed, this is not the debate. The debate is not humans versus machines. But, rather, those who know, manage, and govern AI versus those who don't. And this knowledge gap calls for action like literacy programmes, like upskilling and reskilling initiatives.
In Italy, and I go to answer to your question, our Italian strategy rests on four pillars: Education, scientific research, public administration, and enterprises.
And our efforts aim to bridge the divides, ensuring inclusive growth and empowering people, individuals, to thrive in this AI-driven era.
So, I think that IGF could help us, also the PNAI, they could establish a repository of information on AI governance, also including research papers, best practices. I agree with the Chinese colleague. We need best practices for AI governance in different sectors: Health, manufacturing, transportation, tourism.
And this repository could serve as a valuable resource for discussion on AI governance. And I think that we need the big point now in Italy, but all over the world, is the potential for AI to displace jobs. So, we have also in Italy, but all over the world, several think thanks suggests shifting the tax burden from labour to digital capital to avoid inefficient automation.
We know why automation may cause a loss of jobs. We know this. How we can implement innovative policies to mitigate this impact. So, and I go to conclusion. We have little time. I think that we need discussion, we need a lead agency for digital Italy, I am here with DD Cass. She is in the IGF Italy Secretariat. And we need a discussion, we need a multistakeholder dialogue with academia, with communities, with policymakers, we are policymakers, with industrial stakeholders, and the civil society organization.
How we think about job losses, how we think about measures that can reach the goal that no one is left behind by this revolution. So, I do believe that IGF and the PNAI can contribute with repository discussions. Thank you.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thank you, Mario, for also touching on AI divides, and also not just intelligence divides. You also spoke about those who are governing in AI and those who can't participate in AI governance, as well as impacts of AI, of automation, who was going to be displaced, who is not going to be displaced. Like who does it give power to, and who remains disadvantaged there. Thanks for those remarks.
I will move to Paloma. And I would like to ask you, using Latin American experience -- I love how we are regionally diverse so we give experiences from our different regions. How can PNAI ensure multistakeholder governance, and also how can it enhance capacity building in terms of governance of AI and also in terms of skills for those who are going to use AI?
>> PALOMA LARA-CASTRO: Thank you for the space. I'm representing a Latin American organization with 20 years of experience working in the intersection of technology and human rights. Within our area of work we have been focusing a lot on AI, mainly because not only because it's an emerging issue regarding human rights, but because we participate very actively in different global, regional, and local processes regarding regulation and policy. And we are basing all of our interventions in evidence-based arguments.
So, in that sense I would like to mention that within our frame of work we have a programme that is called artificial intelligence and inclusion, where we have an active investigation from 2019 on the increasing use of AI in sensitive areas of public policies, in Latin America. This is important and it relates to your question but I'm going to expand a bit more on what we found in this research.
So, this research, the parts from the concept that AI is a social technical tool, which means that it arises from society, and so it comes with a baggage of all the social conditions of this production. Thus, to understand the potential impact and fundamental rights, it's not enough to just analyze the technology in itself. For example, to examine algorithms or automation processes. But since there are not implemented in isolation or in a vacuum. Policies that use AI as a tool are implemented in specific and social and political contexts in countries with diverse demographic composition, particularly democratic and regulatory frameworks. Democratic characteristics that are tied to historical processes in governmental administrations that respond to specific situations of each territory.
In that, such special attention should be paid to the differentiated impact that the use of AI may have on historically discriminated groups to mention, for example, gender or indigenous communities. In compliance with the principles of equality and nondiscrimination.
In concrete our investigation seeks to assess the human right impacts from state usage of AI and how and if the principles of legality, necessity and proportionality are taken into account.
The cases that we analyzed show examples of use in sensitive areas of public administration, such as the hours of employment, social protection, public safety, education, and management of procedures, as well as usage in the administration of justice.
The frequent perception of these technologies are focused mainly on their utility in streamlining processes has a decisive influence on the decision to apply them in the public sector. What we found is that the implementation of technology is based on artificial intelligence by the state, poses important challenges in terms of protection of fundamental rights.
One of the main difficulties within our research was to find information, both from open sources, to learn about the actual use, and from interviews from state representatives, given the reluctance of some officials that give details of such use.
It is worth mentioning that many of these technologies are implemented by companies, universities or third parties, contracted by the state under different modalities, which makes access to information even more difficult in that it also shows that in Latin America different states are deg gating to a greater or lesser extent decisions to other persons or corporate entities that in turn execute ultimate decision making models for the development of the action.
Some of the findings of the main findings that we found in this research is first of all, inadequate regulatory frameworks and lack of compliance with international human rights obligations, such as, for example, the three party test. It is also important to consider the different levels of regulatory development in the region with respect to, for example, data protection. We have countries very advanced, that have independent authorities and then we have other countries that don't have still any data protection laws.
The human right impacts related to the use of artificial intelligence have already been recognized by different international pronouncements which highlight not only the need for these tools to fully comply with international human rights, but also that in case that they don't, that they don't meet the criteria at the beginning, then they have to be subjected to a ban or even a moratorium, a moratorium or even a ban. This is something that we are not seeing happening in the process of implementing this technology within public sector. There's no risk assessment on human rights that provide -- that depart from international pronouncements about it.
The other important thing that we found is that there is questionable handling of personal data. Given that the main input for the technical development of artificial intelligence-based technologies is data, this issue is central. However, states in Latin America have difficulties in maintaining robust data use, management, and storage practices, partly due to problems such as fragmentation of databases, heterogeneities among state agencies, the diversity of information systems, and the lack of a common language.
It is necessary to consider -- okay. It is necessary to consider that if we don't take into account specific impact assessments on human rights, we are not only deepening structure inequalities, especially harming marginalized communities, but we are generating new forms of exclusion. In this -- to link it back to the IGF, and I'm going to wrap it up with this, it's important to know that one of the main characteristics of this process, besides from the lack of human rights impact assessment, is the lack of participatory mechanisms for civil society and for other stakeholders. This brings us back to why IGF and not only the global IGF, but also the regional and local IGFs bring about an important relevance to this issue considering these are the spaces that are maintained as a essentially multistakeholder model. While we are seeing accelerated shrinking of civic space, these spaces become even more important and when we think about how global policies also advance need to centralize discussions in New York, which also brings about other deepening of other obstacles such as visa constraints and language barriers and sometimes financial aspects.
So, to bring it back, we need to save the spaces, secure the spaces that have already he proven to be effective in a multistakeholder model and looking into the IGF and its connection with WSIS and the plus 20 review. There is an urgent need to advance to a vision of digital justice with a gender and an intersectional perspective that contextualizes the WSIS core vision to the diverse living experiences of marginalized communities that are deeply affected by state and by corporate authoritarianism. It is a crucial moment, inclusion a recognition of differentiated impacts is essential to secure a rights respected future. Thank you.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thank you. Thank you so much, Paloma.
Without much time, I would like to turn to William Bird to give us some of the context in Africa. And in answering this question, what unique value can the IGF and PNAI give to the global AI governance, and as well as regional AI governance, and now with context to Africa.
>> WILLIAM BIRD: Thanks. I had some notes but actually I have been attending a lot of sessions, and some of the things have impacted what I want to say, which is that we have seen this movie before. We have seen what happens when you allow the markets to determine what goes on. We have seen what happens if you say let's not regulate. There were people on the same stage earlier today saying, no, no, no, don't regulate. Let us do it. We are here for the good of the world. And these kinds of ridiculous things.
And what that resulted in is that we have mainstreamed misogyny. We have now got online gender-based violence as a default operating mechanism on so many of these social media platforms. And that's just one of the areas of online harms.
If it's xenophobia, hey, social media is your new tool of play. I mean, it's the thing that has deepened and replicated online violence and deepened inequalities and fundamentally for our continent it's deepened the digital divides in ways that it made digital divide that much greater and at the moment there seems to be nothing, very little, may not say nothing, but very little that suggests that this AI revolution is going to shift in a different direction for the people of Africa.
We see that digital inequality replicated not just in terms of those who have access to the Internet. But replicated in the inequalities of the actual infrastructure, the data centres, all of these things that are there that need to make sure that AI can function. Most of them aren't on our continent. The means and ability for Africans to use it on the continent. And yet when you see where they are taking their data from, Africa again is further for those LLMs and these other mechanisms.
We have seen this and if we don't learn the lesson, IGF is going to ultimately fail, because this is the latest test case, right?
The thing that's curious about this, is that the Global Digital Compact says our goal is an inclusive, open, sustainable, fair, safe and secure digital future for all. It's a lovely goal, and yet we already seem to be miles away from this.
I would have thought that this move by the United States government to effectively ban any kind of regulation of AI systems would be causing the people here to be running around in a state of near panic, or at least to be saying and coming out with clear and ambiguous, strongly condemning statements that say, this is not okay, because this is how we go down exactly the road of deepening the digital divide. This is how you allow people's data, this is how you allow the worst that AI can deliver to be delivered.
So, I think if we are serious about it, we need to be saying the role of the IGF and the policy network around AI is that this is the time to be bold. We need to be reasserting fundamental rights and not allow those to be ghosted.
I think that we need to go back to this basic principles of transparency and accountability and ethical. Those must be the starting point. And AI systems must be permitted if they don't undermine those principles.
And my last point and then I will be quiet, is that I think being a multistakeholder -- we are very good at this in South Africa. We have people that literally hate each other, sitting down at the table with each other, but what that doesn't mean is it doesn't mean they sit there and don't talk about anything difficult. The nature of these things is that the IGF must facilitate hard conversations. It must make sure that the hard conversations are had and that at the end of those things, the rights-based principles, the principles of dignity, equality, sustainability, those are the things that emerge. No matter what else gets said, those are the principles that we cannot deviate from. Because if we allow ourselves to deviate from that, then all of the evils that we are talking about are going to just persist.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thanks, William. And I like how across the panelists we have talked about how we have different kinds of divides, and it takes me back to when we were talking about the initial, I can't say the initial, but some 10 years ago, when you were taking about Internet Governance connecting the next billion, connectivity was an issue, and it's still an issue right now.
And there are lessons that we can borrow from the milestone that we have achieved from 10 years to up to now, to then the persistent challenges that we have right now in the connectivity and use of the Internet, even how the Internet has evolved from an infrastructure that was so much open to right now the different kinds of business models that are existing that are actually entrenching some of these inequalities.
So, I see there are very many lessons to learn, not just from AI or where we are at with AI, but also with global Internet Governance, the principles we had then, what principles do we have right now, and what principles have we had to let go because of how the world has evolved and even how technology has evolved through. So, thanks for that.
I'd like to bring in our virtual panelists, who is Ivana Bartoletti. Please forgive me for that. I used to think that Africa names are the most difficult to pronounce. But these are the ones that are also challenging as well.
Welcome, Ivana, and I would like to ask you the same question that I asked William Bird, to put PNAI into the context of the different policy processes that are happening, and what is it that the IGF and PNAI can bring into this global policy processes, what are those values that you can insist for them to be there in the processes led by UN and the processes led by different multilateral processes like OECD and even African Union and European Union. Over to you.
>> IVANA BARTOLETTI: Thank you very much. And so sorry for not being able to be physically with you.
So, I think I wanted to say on this really interesting question just a couple of things. The first is that we are living in quite strange time, because I think a lot of people from across the world are looking at artificial intelligence with both excitement and fear in the sense that I think that everybody knows, and many, many people know how AI can be a source of good, can take medicine in places where it can't otherwise be taken. It can help education. It can improve our well-being.
But I also think a lot of people know the potential harms, be it disinformation, be it damages to cognitive abilities, be it, for example, issues related to the impact on young people because of the persuasive capabilities of these tools.
So, we have all that from one hand. And on the other hand, we are still discussing whether we need governance or not. We are still discussing how to organize governance and wrap controls around artificial intelligence, which is a fantastic technology that can bring a lot of good to our world if we manage it properly.
So, if we only look at what happened over the last few weeks and it was mentioned earlier, there are discussions in the U.S. about a moratorium. There are discussions in the European Union to delay implementation of the European AI Act. And but at the same time, there are countries such as Japan, which have introduced different but interesting governance around artificial intelligence, or India, where, for example, there is an important privacy and data protection bill that has an impact on artificial intelligence.
So, the reason why I mention this is because I see the policy network as a bridge between these two things. The fact that on the one hand, there is the concern that people have on the social, economical impact on systems that make decisions about people, besides what we see, have an impact on our human rights, and shape quite differently the way that our social relations are organized.
On the other hand, we have artificial intelligence that is part of the arsenal that people have when it comes to global competition with different ways across the world, then still a patchwork approach for regulation.
So, what I see as the network of the IGF, the policy network, is the capability to bridge that gap between the two different dimensions around artificial intelligence.
So, things, for example, around what are best practice at global level in the way that artificial intelligence has been governed. What are the skills that are needed for businesses and for public sector across the world to leverage data without infringing upon the rights of individuals and then thinking around technologies to enhance privacy.
How do we train a generation of business leaders who use AI not because it's glamorous, not because there is a hype, but because it increases productivity and makes the work of employees better?
How do we create and use AI in a way that does not destroy our environment, adding to the pollution that we already have?
All these are practical elements and ways that we can govern artificial intelligence. I speak as a business. And I want to be clear. Businesses across the world using AI, they need governance. Because without governance, we can't innovate. We can't create the long-lasting innovation rooted in the ability to reinvent the way that we work and operate.
We need AI that we trust. So, trust, to me, is the most important element. I want people to trust AI, companies to trust AI, so that we can use it, and by using it, enhance productivity, bit to generate the trust, organizations like the policy network are crucial, because we need to share how we create the trust, how do we embed human rights, privacy, cybersecurity, legal protection into the design and the deployment of these tools?
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thank you.
>> IVANA BARTOLETTI: Without places where all levels of governments can be expressed, shared, implemented, I think it's going to be difficult moving forward to be able to, in the fragmented world we live in, I think the importance of avenues like this is only going to increase.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thank you, thank you, Ivana -- Ivana, please, apologies if I am butchering your name -- for those interventions.
And I think now from our panelists, across our panelists, we have heard what the concerns are on the governance of AI from divide to human rights, to harms, and even as Ivana says, the role of PNAI can be to build trust within this different policy processes so that we can instill or we can champion some of the IGF into those policy processes. Which is, basically, the same people we see in these processes and we also see them at the IGF. They are still in our networks.
So, I haven't forgotten our virtual moderator, who I will ask if we have any comments from virtual participation or even questions from virtual participation. Over to you.
>> ONLINE MODERATOR: Thank you, everyone.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Please introduce yourself. And then go ahead to tell us what's happening there virtually.
>> GERMAN LOPEZ: Absolutely. Thank you. Here is German Lopez from the telecoms. It's a pleasure to join you as online moderator.
So far we don't have any particular question in the chat. However, I might like to ask the conversation that you are having right now, a question for the panelists, how do you think we should on one hand profit from all these different discussions that are happening at the UN level. I think that's something that pretty much all of you have mentioned. While also avoiding, let's say, regulatory or dial-up fragmentation that makes it difficult for all these different compartments inside the UN to not be able to coordinate it properly. I think we know what we are doing here at the IGF, what's happening with the ITU. I think maybe to know your take on it and thank you very much.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Many thanks, Lopez. And thanks to our panelists.
Now I would like to turn to the audience here, but before I turn to our audience, there's a Mentimeter that will go live on the board. Please make use of your phone and try to answer that question on Menti.com. The code is 33502806.
And as we engage with this Menti.com, do we have any questions from the floor?
I don't know whether we have a standing mic so you have a queue somewhere here at the centre.
We only have four minutes. So, if you can tweak your question into 14 characters, that would be great.
>> PARTICIPANT: Thank you, Elizabeth. Ponce Ileleji speaking, a member of the Policy Network for AI.
What I want is to get views from the panelists on the UN document on governing AI for humanity. We have gaps in terms of representation. I will just focus on that to see what their comments are, on governance. Thank you.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thank you, Poncelet.
Next one.
>> PARTICIPANT: Hi. My name is Jajena Castro from University of Columbia. Thank you for the panel. Please share your thoughts on whether the AI governance should have a general approach with global minimums or via sectors via local approach and if there is an urgency to prioritize some sectors in particular.
I have a second and third questions. In your consideration, what is the role of the EUN guiding principles on business and human rights on the AI governance?
Finally, if you can share some comments on how the role of social sciences and academia in AI governance and some insights on how to be included in the conversation. Thank you very much.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thank you.
>> PARTICIPANT: I'm from the PNAI. I have a question to the panel, which is regard, what do you think, what kind of improvement the PNAI IGF needs to do in order for them to have more in terms of the intervention power, you know, inferences in policymaking, because this is a multistakeholder process where there's a multinational process going on at the UN level.
How do you perceive the relationship between the PNAI or the IGF and all these multinational process going on in the Global Network. Thank you.
>> PARTICIPANT: Thank you very much. My name is Kunle Olorundare. I'm from Nigeria. I'm the president of Internet Society Nigeria chapter.
My question has to do with trust. For me, trust is a big deal, especially when it comes to an environment where a lot of people developing different applications in terms of talking about AI. Yeah. So my question is this. I want the panelists to hear -- I want to hear the views of the panelists with respect to having a universal framework on artificial intelligence, because I believe that is what can actually build this trust we are talking about, trust in which every stakeholder is carried along. Thank you very much.
>> PARTICIPANT: Thank you very much. May I first acknowledge and say to my fellow countryman, William Bird, that we are very proud of you in South Africa and it's good to see you on the panel. And you would understand and appreciate the context of my question more than anybody else, I would think.
Is the notion true, is there any truth in the notion that AI systems is recreating a digital apartheid in the fact that it is mirroring historical patterns of racial segregation? I thank you.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thanks. Please go ahead. And can I ask that we close the line now? Because our time is up. So, we have one question there and one here. Please go ahead.
>> PARTICIPANT: I will move in French. Hello. I'm Kosi Messi, I come from Benin. Hello, everyone. I am Kosi Messi. I come from Benin. And this session for me is absolutely crucial. It allows us to talk about a topic that we do not talk about enough. In Africa, we produce data, but our data are often externalized or they are accessible in data centres that are not on our territories.
How do we participate to the training of artificial intelligence in our own labs without having the data on site? Can we have virtual spaces to conserve the data for us to train our own AIs? Thank you.
>> PARTICIPANT: Hello. This is Jasmin Ko from Hong Kong I'm a PNAI lead and youth lead Asia Pacific policy research survey. This season we are doing about AI impact in different areas, such as misinformation.
One question I would like to seek for your advice is given that we have so many to kit and resources guidelines developed by different institutions, the leading ones such as UNESCO, EU and also ITU, et cetera. So, how would you suggest researcher to navigate this, a lot of different frameworks, develop differently and how can we be strategic in order to make use of the existing resources. And also to spot if there is any gap that haven't been addressed enough in these existing thing. Thank you very much.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thanks. Thanks a lot.
I think now we have some of the answers coming up to this question on Menti.com that I would like our panelists to respond to as we respond to some of the questions that have come here. We have about 18 minutes to do this. But I will read some for you. And this, I would translate this as values, because the question was, in one word, what would be the future role of the IGF and the Policy Network on AI in global AI governance.
And we have some of the common values here that you have: Funding, integration, transparency, a facilitator role, someone said that PNAI can be a bridge from the panelists, convener, multistakeholder, privacy, and then we have these are the values, digital cooperation, digital divide and integrity and inclusion.
I would like to turn to our panelists and I will start with the virtual panelists because we ate into some of your time. If you can respond to some of these questions and I would like to mention some of them. Representation gaps, and I think here, Poncelet mentioned that in these various policy processes, there's lack of representation from participants from the Global South, as well as these processes themselves, they also lack country participation themselves. As countries come together to have AI governance or, frankly, AI governance kind of cooperation, not much is happening in the Global South when it comes to those processes, such as G7, G20 and the rest.
Please also speak about the role of UN guiding principles on UN, business and human rights.
Over to you, Ivana, if you can use two minutes.
>> IVANA BARTOLETTI: Thank you so much. I wanted to say first, I wanted to say that AI has never been not regulated. Sorry to start from this. Legislation around privacy, consumer, quality, nondiscrimination, human rights law already apply to artificial intelligence. Why am I saying this?
Because often artificial intelligence has been used as an excuse to breach existing legislation. This is very important to bear in mind. Very important to bear in mind that we are not starting from scratch. That we have to think about how existing legislation applies to artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision-making and all of that.
Governance of AI comes in many different ways: Business governance, state governance, global governance, the UN and, very important, the Digital Compact.
My key issue is how do we make sure that we know where countries and how they are performing against it. How do we know what is happening? And is there a way that we can assess as we do with many other things, as we assess in sort of index, how countries are interpreting those values in the Digital Compact. And to me, that is very, very important.
We have heard over the years a proliferation of documents from the OECD and its fantastic work its doing, especially on privacy; from the UNESCO, amazing work, especially on education. A proliferation of tools that are soft governance around artificial intelligence.
And we know that there has been the prevalence of the north into these processes, not the UN necessarily, but when it comes, for example, to the G7, G20, and this is a space where we can certainly have the more global participation that is needed. But this is absolutely proof and even where the big AI tech are located across the world, that there is a concentration that keeps many countries out.
So, I wanted just to conclude by saying that that trust, what does it need? It needs governance in many different levels. Existing laws and how we comply with those, upholding human rights in the age of AI and what that means. Do we need more? Do we need -- how do we do this in practice, including privacy, to privacy enhancive technology.
Civic participation across the globe. And we need to ensure that we have, although different in different countries, from the European AI act to EU, Japan, China, it's different. We need to make sure that we have regulation supporting the entrance of this tool into the market so that we know that people can trust them and business can trust them, because due diligence has gone into these tools before they are marketed.
And I think this is a crucial element that needs to be taken into consideration, how we govern all of these, the legislation that we put around this, this is complex, obviously. In Europe, the AI Act is one example of potentially many. But we need to understand that there is no conflict between having some controls around these tools and innovation, actually they can go hand in hand. And this is something that we, in occasions like this, we really have to stress and highlight.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thanks. Thanks, Ivana.
And some of them about is not actually a conflict of values, but how we are going to balance between one value and the other. And that requires honest conversations and it also requires a trust environment.
Now I'd like to bring the conversation to our panelists who are here with us physically. And it turn to you to talk about trust, bridging from what Ivana and speaking about the role of PNAI in fostering that trust environment in the IGF network and this policy processes.
>> MARIO NOBILE: I agree with Ivana and I will try to answer friends from Nigeria. I think technology evolves faster than most governments, public administration and stakeholders can innovate. We have technology at a relentless pay. So, I agree with Vaughan, we have -- I am European, so we have GDPR for privacy, AI Act, NIST, too, for cybersecurity and so on.
But it's a matrix. So everyone is looking for trustworthy AI, but trustworthy AI is regulation, okay, it's a compliance with regulation we have. But it's also digital sovereignty. Our friend from Nigeria said how my data centre is in Nigeria or anywhere.
And so, I am happy with the European regulation. We have the free, the fundamental right impact assessment in the AI Act. But we have yet to establish a European hyperscale cloud so we have a problem.
So, I go to conclusion. I think it's a matrix. I think that no one has the solution, but it's important to talk, to discuss about these themes. So the role of PNAI, as I mentioned earlier, is to discuss digital sovereignty, compliance, fundamental rights, and technology evolves. Now we have agentic AI agents. So big opportunities natural language processing. Inclusion, citizen inclusion, people with disabilities. We can get to goals unbelievable. But we have another technology. So, the principles in the GDPR, in the AI Act are old. We must refresh them. That is the point. And we must talk about and discuss about this.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Yeah. Indeed, there are learning points from some of the other processes that have come before AI that you can use in the governance of AI when it comes to the role of PNAI.
I'd like to go to Shuyan Wu. And the question is related to what you had already presented previously. And I'd like to ask you, what improvements can IGF do? How can it gain more influence when it navigates this other policy processes? Thank you very much for your question. I actually was going to talk about how IGF and PNAI can help create trust inclusive in dialogues and thoughts about those topics. I think AI presents shared challenges and opportunities for humanity. So, we should use PNAI on such platforms to ensure diversity so that our conversations can include different genders, races, regions and age groups also.
And during that process of communications and dialogues, we need to allow the opinions to be fully expressed so that when you think about whether marginalized groups can have their items included in agendas. Also the quality and access resources, we need to ensure that equal opportunities are provided to those marginalized groups. And also the global equality issue. The principles arose have to consider different specific development stages of different countries. I think with this kind of efforts, we can make better use of IGF and the PNAI to create an environment with greater trust. Thank you.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thank you, Shuyan Wu. And I would like to go to William Bird. We have heard several interventions from our African participants and also an intervention from one of our panelists on how we can ensure trust, and also in data, data that is not in Africa, how can we ensure international collaboration to make sure that this data is used for the development of AI and even other development, African development.
Please speak to the issue of data, the cross-border data flows and also things to do with representation gaps, as it affects the Global South and also Africa.
>> WILLIAM BIRD: Thank you. I think that the reality is simply the question was, is it recreating some form of new version of apartheid, and the short answer is, I'm not sure if it's quite as extreme as that. But it is certainly recreating the inequalities that typified colonialism. And this seems to be on many levels a new form of that in many -- actually, in many practices.
And your colleague from Benin, who spoke after you highlighted that point talking exactly about data that is harvested from Africans, not kept on African shores, and we have no idea that it's there, and yet it's there.
The short answer, how I'm going to deal with this? As African states, we need to mobilize and come together. Because many individual states don't have the kind of power to challenge these multinationals, but together we can. As the continent that's getting younger with young people, we need to make sure we have a duty to them to make sure that we mobilize and come together and start to levy huge fines on these global entities.
The Global Digital Justice Forum, in fact, just made some of its submission to the WSIS+20 and one of the things that they are calling for is a digital development tax that should be imposed on these entities in order to fundamentally address this inequality because we can talk about it, we know what it is. The question is, what do we do about it? Short answer, tax, fine them, digital tax for that development. These aren't nice to haves that we are saying we are poor African states, we need this. This is about fundamental rights to equality, it's about redress and repatriation.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thanks, William.
And Paloma, I have reserved the question of human rights to you because your presentation really much touched on human rights and in the digital age also touching on the human rights, global human rights framework.
If you can match some of those questions to your earlier presentation.
>> PALOMA LARA-CASTRO: Thanks, Liz. I think that, as I mentioned, we are at a crucial moment, we are discussing issues that are going to be -- that are central and going to be more central in the following years. One of the things we are seeing is, like I mentioned, lack of compliance with existing frameworks. That translates to two things. On the one hand, like was mentioned within one of the questions for the audience, is the fragmentation of discussions. This fragmentation of discussions does not only happen in the themes to be discussed in different fora, but this fragmentation also happens in the recognition of certain rights and limitations.
We see some pronouncements international human rights that point to the need to take into account not only a system framework, but also the need to contextualize to the present challenges and, as the colleague mentioned, they need to safeguard the future and what is the youth going to be -- what is youth going to be -- how is it going to be interacting with this world, where there's lack -- not only democratic setbacks, but also geopolitical shifts that are affecting deeply into the world and in affected communities. We do need to think about the coherence of international framework in these discussions. That's on the one hand.
And on the other hand, they need to avoid duplication of processes. We are in a moment right now, as was mentioned, we have the GDC, we have Pact for the Future, we have the WSIS+20 review. We need to coordinate these efforts, not only, as I mentioned, avoid duplication, but also ensure meaningful participation as a key element to advance in the protection of international human rights.
This is important to mention that it's not only participation or meaningful participation, it's not only a human rights in itself, but it's also necessary to guide states in the compliance of their obligations in human rights.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Thanks, Paloma.
And I am going to be unfair by not giving you a chance to have a parting shot. If I was going to do that, I was going to ask you to do it in one word, but that's not going to be possible now, checking the time.
But I'd like to thank our panelists. Please join me in thanking them for the great contributions that they have had to this session.
(Applause)
>> MARIO NOBILE: Thank you to the moderator.
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Yeah, someone says clap for me as the moderator.
(Applause)
>> ELIZABETH OREMBO: Yes, and also to our audience, those who are participating with us physically and those who are also participating with us virtually. And like I said, this is an interaction that is meant to act as a feedback for the PNAI network to see how they are going to shape their work going forward.
Thank you for participating in the Menti.com, which is going to be very valuable. People who asked those questions, we are going to take those questions into our feedback mechanism.
And the last process for feedback, we have this survey link. Please take the code, take the link. There are a few questions for you there to help us improve the Policy Network on AI moving forward. Shamira, who had presented to us what PNAI is about and the different tracks and the processes and the reports that they have produced and shared within different processes, she also shared how you can participate in the PNAI network. If you need more information about that, Rita is there and Sam and there are some other people who are on the mic saying they are on the PNAI network. You can join the network, see how you can contribute to the network, and see how we can widen the impact of PNAI.
Otherwise, thank you. It's been a great session.
