A/HRC/56/68 concerns about racial discrimination. Generative artificial intelligence is changing the world and has the potential to drive increasingly seismic societal shifts in the future. The rapid spread of the application of artificial intelligence across various fields is of deep concern to the Special Rapporteur. This is not because artificial intelligence is without potential benefits. In fact, it presents possible opportunities for innovation and inclusion. Such technologies are, however, growing and evolving with largely unbridled momentum. The Special Rapporteur is concerned that policy and legal measures that seek to manage and regulate artificial intelligence are not keeping pace with the growth of this technology and that emerging efforts to govern and regulate it are insufficiently attentive to its huge current capacity and future potential to both perpetuate and deepen systemic racial discrimination, as well as to widen inequality within and between regions, countries and communities. 7. As articulated by the previous mandate holder, there is an enduring and harmful notion that technology is neutral and objective: The public perception of technology tends to be that it is inherently neutral and objective, and some have pointed out that this presumption of technological objectivity and neutrality is one that remains salient even among producers of technology. But technology is never neutral – it reflects the values and interests of those who influence its design and use, and is fundamentally shaped by the same structures of inequality that operate in society.7 8. In the present report, the Special Rapporteur addresses the ways in which the predominant assumption that technology is objective and neutral is allowing artificial intelligence to perpetuate racial discrimination. A. Cross-cutting ways in which artificial intelligence can contribute to manifestations of racial discrimination 9. Artificial intelligence is not a monolith. Indeed, there are several types. Predictive artificial intelligence is considered a “traditional” form of the technology, and the models use historical data, patterns and trends to make informed predictions about future events or outcomes. 10. Artificial intelligence that is used to identify printed characters, human faces, objects and other information is another form of “traditional” artificial intelligence and encompasses various technologies for recognizing and distinguishing objects, individuals and patterns in the data with which it is provided. 11. Generative artificial intelligence systems are newer forms of artificial intelligence. They are versatile and can be used for a range of purposes. They encompass a class of artificial intelligence systems designed to produce diverse outputs on the basis of extensive training data sets, neural networks, deep learning architecture and user prompts. Generative artificial intelligence models can produce a wide range of output, including images, text, audio, video and synthetic data. Unlike artificial intelligence models that are focused on identifying patterns in existing data, generative artificial intelligence is trained to create new data points that mimic the patterns in and characteristics of the data used to train machine learning models. The advent of generative artificial intelligence will lead to many new applications, as well as many new human rights questions. 8 12. These different types of artificial intelligence have a multitude of applications. The Special Rapporteur elaborates on more specific examples of the uses of artificial intelligence, and related implications in terms of racial discrimination, below. She wishes to stress, however, that it is very important to examine commonalities in the ways in which artificial intelligence can perpetuate racial discrimination, particularly within legal and policy debates relating to its management and regulation. In such debates, the effects of artificial intelligence must be viewed through the lens of systemic racism, defined as the “operation of a complex, 7 8 GE.24-08849 A/HRC/44/57, para. 12. Australia Human Rights Commission submission. All submissions will be posted on the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). 3