Amnesty International is getting involved in the AI debate! They say that data pipelines powering major generative AI systems are invasions of privacy!

In their briefing released yesterday (Global: Enormous data pipelines powering major generative AI systems are rooted in mass invasions of privacy by design, available here), Amnesty International released a briefing titled Unlawful by Design: Exposing the Human Rights Costs of Generative AI, which documents serious risks in the large-scale data scraping and processing being used to build and train these systems, including violations of the right to privacy by design and adverse consequences for the environment and historically marginalized communities.

“Companies across the world are supplying generative AI products under the veneer of efficiency and sophistication, but in reality, these systems perpetuate mass invasions of privacy through unlawful web scraping: an automated process for extracting data from websites, including personal data, such as images and social media activity, to train AI models,” said Likhita Banerji, Head of the Algorithmic Accountability Lab, Amnesty International.   

“The extractive data pipeline, inherent design choices made by tech companies and exploitative supply chains, to build generative AI systems have enabled a paradigm of technology development that opens up a risk of mass abuse of human rights.” 

Amnesty International says it “researched the models powering some of the most popular publicly available standalone generative AI tools, including GPT 3 by Open AI, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, DeepSeek and tools by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.”

Their 44-page briefing (available for download here) examines how (in their words) “standalone generative AI systems, based on unlawful web scraping, are in conflict with international human rights law (IHRL) and standards through their design, development and deployment. While these technologies promise sophisticated automation and efficiency, they rely on data collection and model training practices that abuse privacy rights, enable discrimination, and threaten freedom of expression and thought.”

They go on to say that “Amnesty International finds that standalone generative AI systems, based on unlawful web scraping, depend on mass invasions of privacy by design, and are fundamentally incompatible with IHRL. As such, Amnesty International is calling for a prohibition of such systems.” (emphasis added)

Wow.

Will that call to action make a difference? Probably not. Does it mean they’re wrong. Not necessarily.

So, what do you think? Do you agree that data pipelines powering major generative AI systems are invasions of privacy? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using DALL-E 3, using the term “robots with vacuum cleaners sucking data out of workstations”.

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