4주차｜기술·ICT·정보보안_박정윤

[박정윤]

AI: protecting human rights through smart oversight

Transcript of the keynote address delivered  at the Parliamentary Conference on Artificial Intelligence, organised by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the parliament of the United Kingdom

Speaker: Michael O’Flaherty (the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights)

Date: 15 December 2025

<Glossary>

1. slops :  AI가 대량으로 만들어낸 저품질·왜곡·의미 없는 데이터

2. autonomous decision-making. : 자율적 의사결정

<참고자료>

* 교황 레오 13세 (재위: 1878년 ~ 1903년)

   -산업화로 생긴 사회 문제에 교회가 침묵하지 말아야 한다고 본 교황

   -“산업혁명은 기술의 문제가 아니라, 인간의 존엄과 사회 정의의 문제다” 라고 처음으로 공식화함

* 교황 레오 14세 (즉위: 2025년 5월) _ 현 교황

(408 words)

<Script>

Honorable members of this and other Parliaments, dear friends.

Earlier this year, the Catholic Church elected a new leader.

He chose the name Leo, and he made clear at the time, he had a very specific reason.

He wanted to associate himself with a former Leo, who had been Pope during the last great industrial revolution.

He considered that we are living in another great industrial revolution, that of artificial intelligence.

Leo, in other words, reminded us very forcefully this year of the extent to which AI is of epochal significance, of significance for good, and of significance for the potential possibility to transform our lives for the better and to do it with unprecedented efficiency.

But of course, great benefit comes with great risk.

What is fascinating about the risks associated with AI is that one can observe a cumulative understanding of risk over the last 15 to 20 years.

It began with risks to privacy.

Inevitably, a data-driven technology was going to first trigger such issues.

But very quickly, it became also about discrimination.

This risk and reality did not diminish.

It got far worse over time, and particularly with the arrival of the LLMs, the large language models. Discrimination in the AI space is a very great problem.

It is massively exacerbated by what we used to call dirty data, what we now call slops.

Very closely associated, there is the phenomenon of disinformation, or rather, the capacity of AI to vastly multiply the reach and the impact of disinformation.

And I include here the deep fakes that we have referred to already this morning.

More recent dangers, predicted for a long time, but only seen more recently, surround issues of autonomous decision-making.

It has capacity for great harm in the context of everything from drones to chatbots.

Reference has been made to the impact on the environment.

I read this morning that right now, 25% of the Irish energy grid goes to data centers.

And it is predicted to get even worse.

It is an issue of electricity and water. 

And we are all becoming aware, without quite being able to put our finger on it, of the extent to which AI is challenging and engaging issues such as human identity and social relations.

In other words, friends, AI has profound impact on human dignity, human well-being, and therefore, for human rights.

That, in turn, triggers a duty on our states to protect us.