Ukraine ramps up mobilisation to replenish troop numbers more than 28 months since Russia's invasion. But Ukrainian men are becoming less eager to fight amid waning public enthusiasm for wartime service. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has lowered the draft age to 25 from 27 in April and signed off on an overhaul of the mobilisation process that entered force in May. A network of laboratories in hundreds of secret workshops across Ukraine is reportedly leveraging innovation to create a robot army that the country hopes will kill Russian troops and save its own wounded soldiers and civilians. Defence startups across the country – about 250 according to industry estimates – are reportedly creating the killing machines at secret locations that typically look like rural car repair shops, according to an Associated Press news investigation.

Brazil's national data protection authority has ordered Meta to halt the use of data originating from the country to train its AI models. Meta's current privacy policy enables the company to use data from its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to train its artificial intelligence models. However, that practice will no longer be permitted in Brazil after its national data protection authority gave the company five days to change its policy on Tuesday. Brazil said the company will need to confirm it has stopped using the data or face a daily non-compliance fine of 50,000 Brazilian Reals (almost 9000), citing "the imminent risk of serious and irreparable or difficult-to-repair damage to the fundamental rights of the affected data subjects." Meta said it was "disappointed" with the Brazilian authority's decision, saying it was a "step backward for innovation."

Over 170 images and personal details of children from Brazil have been scraped by an open-source dataset without their knowledge or consent, and used to train AI, claims a new report from Human Rights Watch released Monday. The images have been scraped from content posted as recently as 2023 and as far back as the mid-1990s, according to the report, long before any internet user might anticipate that their content might be used to train AI. Human Rights Watch claims that personal details of these children, alongside links to their photographs, were included in LAION-5B, a dataset that has been a popular source of training data for AI startups. "Their privacy is violated in the first instance when their photo is scraped and swept into these datasets. And then these AI tools are trained on this data and therefore can create realistic imagery of children," says Hye Jung Han, children's rights and technology researcher at Human Rights Watch and the researcher who found these images.

Human Rights Watch said Thursday that Burkina Faso's security forces last year killed at least 60 civilians in three different drone strikes, which the group says may have constituted war crimes. The West African nation's government claimed the strikes targeted extremists, including jihadi fighters and rebel groups that have been operating in many remote communities. The accusation by the New York-based watchdog were the latest in a string of similar charges raised by various rights groups. "The government should urgently and impartially investigate these apparent war crimes, hold those responsible to account, and provide adequate support for the victims and their families," HRW said in a new report. A mural is seen in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on March 1, 2023.

"The questions asked don't reflect the reality we exist in," says Abdelhamad, a father of two who makes 250 dinars ($353) a month and struggles to make ends meet, as quoted in the report. Takaful also reinforces existing gender-based discrimination by relying on sexist legal codes. The cash assistance is provided to Jordanian citizens only, and one indicator the algorithm takes into account is the size of a household. Although Jordanian men who marry a noncitizen can pass on citizenship to their spouse, Jordanian women who do so cannot. For such women, this results in a lower reportable household size, making them less likely to receive assistance.

Potential advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) could have profound implications for how countries research and develop weapons systems, and how militaries deploy those systems on the battlefield. The idea of AI-enabled military systems has motivated some activists to call for restrictions or bans on some weapon systems, while others have argued that AI may be too diffuse to control. This paper argues that while a ban on all military applications of AI is likely infeasible, there may be specific cases where arms control is possible. Throughout history, the international community has attempted to ban or regulate weapons or military systems for a variety of reasons. This paper analyzes both successes and failures and offers several criteria that seem to influence why arms control works in some cases and not others. We argue that success or failure depends on the desirability (i.e., a weapon's military value versus its perceived horribleness) and feasibility (i.e., sociopolitical factors that influence its success) of arms control. Based on these criteria, and the historical record of past attempts at arms control, we analyze the potential for AI arms control in the future and offer recommendations for what policymakers can do today.

The European Union's plan to regulate artificial intelligence is ill-equipped to protect people from flawed algorithms that deprive them of lifesaving benefits and discriminate against vulnerable populations, Human Rights Watch said in report on the regulation. The European Parliament should amend the regulation to better protect people's rights to social security and an adequate standard of living. The 28-page report in the form of a question-and-answer document, "How the EU's Flawed Artificial Intelligence Regulation Endangers the Social Safety Net," examines how governments are turning to algorithms to allocate social security support and prevent benefits fraud. Drawing on case studies in Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and the United Kingdom, Human Rights Watch found that this trend toward automation can discriminate against people who need social security support, compromise their privacy, and make it harder for them to qualify for government assistance. But the regulation will do little to prevent or rectify these harms.

The European Union’s plan to regulate artificial intelligence is ill-equipped to protect people from flawed algorithms that deprive them of lifesaving benefits and discriminate against vulnerable populations, Human Rights Watch said in report on the regulation released today. The European Parliament should amend the regulation to better protect people’s rights to social security and an adequate standard of living.

The European Parliament should amend the regulation to better protect people's rights to social security and an adequate standard of living. The 28-page report in the form of a question-and-answer document, "How the EU's Flawed Artificial Intelligence Regulation Endangers the Social Safety Net," examines how governments are turning to algorithms to allocate social security support and prevent benefits fraud. Drawing on case studies in Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and the United Kingdom, Human Rights Watch found that this trend toward automation can discriminate against people who need social security support, compromise their privacy, and make it harder for them to qualify for government assistance. But the regulation will do little to prevent or rectify these harms. "The EU's proposal does not do enough to protect people from algorithms that unfairly strip them of the benefits they need to support themselves or find a job," said Amos Toh, senior researcher on artificial intelligence and human rights at Human Rights Watch.

The European Union's (EU) proposed plan to regulate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to undermine the bloc's social safety net, and is ill-equipped to protect people from surveillance and discrimination, according to a report by Human Rights Watch. Social security support across Europe is increasingly administered by AI-powered algorithms, which are being used by governments to allocate life-saving benefits, provide job support and control access to a variety of social services, said Human Rights Watch in its 28-page report, How the EU's flawed artificial intelligence regulation endangers the social safety net. Drawing on case studies from Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland and the UK, the non-governmental organisation (NGO) found that Europe's trend towards automation is discriminating against people in need of social security support, compromising their privacy, and making it harder for them to obtain government assistance. It added that while the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) proposal, which was published in April 2021, does broadly acknowledge the risks associated with AI, "it does not meaningfully protect people's rights to social security and an adequate standard of living". "In particular, its narrow safeguards neglect how existing inequities and failures to adequately protect rights – such as the digital divide, social security cuts, and discrimination in the labour market – shape the design of automated systems, and become embedded by them."