New UN research highlights impression of AI and cybersecurity on girls, peace and safety in Southeast Asia

BANGKOK, Thailand — As synthetic intelligence (AI) is launched, systemic points can put girls’s security in danger, and gender bias throughout extensively used AI techniques threatens to undermine peace and safety within the south. This poses a serious impediment to the lively use of AI on this context. East Asia.

Furthermore, girls human rights defenders (WHRDs) and girls civil society organizations (WCSOs) within the area are at excessive danger of encountering cyber threats, and though they’re usually conscious of those dangers, they don’t essentially put together for or proactively reply to them. There isn’t any manner you may get well from it. Cyber ​​assault.

These are the findings of a ground-breaking research revealed at this time by UN Women and the United Nations University Research Institute (UNU Macau) inspecting the hyperlinks between AI, digital safety and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda in Southeast Asia. This is without doubt one of the essential achievements of .

This analysis was made potential with help from the Australian Government underneath the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s (DFAT) Cyber ​​and Critical Technology Cooperation Program (CCTCP) and the South Korean Government via the UN Women Initiative. Women, Peace, and Cybersecurity: Promoting Women, Peace, and Security in a Digital World.

AI is predicted so as to add US$1 trillion to the gross home product of Southeast Asian international locations by 2030, and understanding the impression of those applied sciences on the WPS agenda will assist these international locations regulate applied sciences and cut back danger. This is extraordinarily essential in serving to to scale back the danger.

The report, Artificial Intelligence and the Women, Peace, and Security Challenges in Southeast Asia, focuses on 4 varieties of gender bias in AI (discrimination, stereotyping, exclusion, and insecurity) and makes use of this distinctive perspective to determine alternatives for AI. and verifying dangers. These points must be addressed earlier than the area can absolutely profit from new technological developments.

This research investigates the connection between AI and WPS primarily based on three varieties of AI and their functions: peace AI, impartial AI, and battle AI.

Across these classes, the report finds that AI has each favorable and unfavorable results on girls’s company in gender-responsive peace and peacemaking efforts.

While using AI for peaceable functions has a number of advantages, together with growing inclusivity and the effectiveness of battle prevention and monitoring proof of human rights violations, AI use is unequal throughout genders and gender bias is pervasive, making girls much less prone to profit from the applying of those applied sciences.

The report additionally highlights the dangers related to using these applied sciences for army functions.

This research identifies two facets to enhance the dynamics of the AI ​​and WPS agenda within the area. One is to de-risk AI techniques to drive the WPS agenda, particularly in social media, but in addition in different instruments corresponding to chatbots and cellular functions. And, in step with the WPS dedication, we are going to foster the event of AI instruments explicitly constructed to help gender-sensitive peace.

The second report, Cybersecurity Threats, Vulnerabilities and Resilience amongst Women Human Rights Defenders and Civil Society in Southeast Asia, goals to advertise cyber resilience and human and digital rights for all girls. We examine cybersecurity dangers and vulnerabilities on this context. their range.

There is rising consciousness of the dangers that girls and women face in our on-line world, however the impression of gender on cybersecurity and the processes and practices used to guard digital techniques and networks from cyber dangers and their harms stay unclear. Little understood.

This research is notable for its human-centered focus in comparison with technology-centered cybersecurity, emphasizing human components somewhat than technical abilities and the centralization of gender as essential to cybersecurity. This is completely different from earlier analysis on cybersecurity.

Additionally, cyber threats are understood to be gendered in nature, and WCSO and WHRD are significantly focused due to the main focus of their work, making them extra prone to be attacked with misogynistic and sexual harassment. Become.

The outcomes spotlight that digital applied sciences are central to the work of WCSOs and WHRDs, whereas additionally mentioning that WCSOs have larger menace perceptions and experiences of threats than CSOs not engaged on gender or girls’s rights, inserting them at disproportionate danger of disrupting and damaging their operations, and even damaging or harming girls’s reputations, all of which contribute to the marginalization of girls’s voices.

The largest variations in threats skilled between teams have been from on-line harassment, trolling (intentionally upsetting one other particular person on-line to incite a response), and id theft (having private or private data posted on-line with out permission by somebody on-line). (to be distributed about).

The report’s suggestions embody selling a complete and collaborative strategy in cybersecurity coverage improvement and engagement, and growing applicable prevention and response measures towards cyber-attacks and their disproportionate impression on WCSO. It contains constructing the information of civil society, authorities, personal sector actors, and different choice makers. And W.H.R.D.

Particular consideration must be paid to people and organizations in danger, corresponding to girls’s organizations working in politically unstable, conflict- and crisis-affected settings, or in conditions the place civic house is shrinking.

The announcement was made throughout UN Women’s youth convention, Gen-Forum 2024: Young Leaders for Women, Peace and Security in Asia and Pacific, which opened at this time in Bangkok, Thailand.

United Nations University Macau and the UN Women’s Agency intention for this 12-month research to contribute to the worldwide debate on ethics and norms surrounding AI and digital governance typically.

Training supplies primarily based on the analysis findings and consultations with native girls’s rights advocates will then be rolled out, initially in Thailand and Vietnam, with e-learning modules and coaching handbooks out there in English, Thai and Vietnamese for stakeholders of curiosity. It will likely be made out there to events. From mid-2024.

Source hyperlink