“In 11 countries in the Global South, up to one child per classroom reported that AI was used to create sexually explicit deepfakes of them,” reports AI-generated child sexual abuse material to US CyberTip line NCMEC is increasing exponentiallysaid Sonia Livingstone from the Independent International Global Scientific Panel on AI.
Ms Livingstone highlighted other key findings from the panel’s first preliminary report commissioned by the UN General Assembly, stressing that the evidence of AI-related harms against individuals, vulnerable and disadvantaged groups is “much more compelling” than the benefits.
This is because the technology is used.“Creating and reinforcing belief and deception, spreading disinformation and distrust.”with personal data being “extracted, manipulated, misused, exploited” by self-learning systems, she claimed.
Professor Sonia Livingstone, United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, speaks at the Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva, Switzerland.
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Universal problem
Precisely because AI can be used for harm – and for good – the United Nations believes that all countries should be involved in deciding how to manage the technology.
The first global AI dialogue in Geneva – on the sidelines of the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU) AI for Good summit – will be followed by a second summit in New York next May.
One way to ensure that AI serves humanity and does not work against it is to firmly anchor equality, accountability and human control in its design, development and deployment, emphasized Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“We do not view safety standards for medicines, cars or airplanes as barriers to progress. They are the reason people trust these technologies in the first place,” he emphasized.
Seizure of power
Among the many unresolved governance issues, one of the biggest is the energy-hungry data centers that power today’s AI platforms – leading to an industry-wide call for transparency from the UN Secretary-General.
“Anyone with a cell phone, cellular service, or laptop can connect to the cloud and benefit from AI to some extent. But The impacts, the negative impacts that we’re seeing are very, very localsaid Sasha Luccioni, co-founder of the Sustainable AI Group.
Some of the world’s most marginalized people are already suffering “in terms of water, in terms of energy and emissions, in terms of health impacts that are getting worse,” she said.
Aside from the challenge of deciding how to measure the environmental impact of AI, Jhalak Kakkar, a digital policy expert from the Center for Communication Governance at the National Law University in Delhi, feared this would be the case There is a risk that existing inequalities in the Global South will become even worse.
“How do we deal with the impacts that arise when the economic and other value is created in a place that is very, very far from the communities that are most affected?”
Code block
It is also becoming increasingly clear that as the pace of AI development increases, it becomes increasingly difficult for legislative oversight to keep up.
“We need to be able to open the black boxes of AI“, emphasized Moroccan Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, who explained that large language models draw on around 180 billion parameters when they run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “There are very few lawyers and very few sociologists who are able to understand exactly what is going on,” she said.
“Even AI researchers sometimes don’t have the tools to understand the complexity of these algorithms.”
Online abuse trend
Today, one in four human rights defenders, activists and journalists who took part in a survey commissioned by the UN gender equality agency, UN Women, said they had experienced AI-powered online violence; Six percent said they had fallen victim to deepfakes or digitally manipulated images. “Much of it goes undocumented, unnoticed and unreportedsaid Sima Bahous, Executive Director at UN Women.
Related to this is the fact that “when we look at who is developing AI, women are largely underrepresented” and only make up 30 percent of the technology industry’s global workforce, the agency head emphasized. According to the report by the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI: 88 percent of leading AI researchers are male.
Sima Bahous, Executive Director at UN Women, speaks at the Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva, Switzerland.
Universal debate
The Global dialogue on AI governance is to ensure that the priorities of all nations are taken into account and not just those of the most technologically advanced. The United Nations firmly believes that the benefits of AI must reach everyone.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/07/1167886
