AI and Human Rights: Written Evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights Evidence

Abstract

This submission to the UK Joint Committee on Human Rights examines the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on fundamental human rights through the emerging framework of epistemic rights. It argues that AI technologies—particularly generative AI, recommender systems, surveillance infrastructures, and neurotechnologies—pose significant risks to the rights to privacy, freedom of thought, access to information, dignity, and the free development of personality as protected under international human rights law. The submission highlights how AI-driven data extraction, hyper-personalisation, deceptive design, and biometric and neural data processing undermine individual autonomy, epistemic justice, and democratic participation. While elements of the UK’s existing legal framework already protect aspects of these rights, the report finds current protections fragmented and insufficiently adapted to AI-mediated harms, especially for children and vulnerable groups. In this submission, we recommend that the UK explicitly recognise epistemic rights within its human rights approach to AI, strengthen regulatory safeguards—particularly for neurotechnologies—and resist utilitarian trade-offs that weaken fundamental rights in the name of innovation or economic growth.