Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers may look back on 2018 as the year that human rights became crucial to advancing the technology. Over the last six months of the year, a slew of reports focused on "artificial intelligence and human rights" were published by a variety of well-respected entities, including the most recent report of the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, Berkman Klein's report on "Artificial Intelligence & Human Rights: Opportunities & Risks", Access Now's "Human Rights in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" report, The Council of Europe's Draft Recommendation of the Committee of Ministers to member States on human rights impacts of algorithmic systems, and Business for Social Responsibility's, "Artificial Intelligence: A Rights-Based Blueprint for Business" series. Earlier in the year, I was asked to help kick off a workshop organized by Data & Society on the same topic and I wrote this post based on the remarks I prepared for that conference, supplemented by a few takeaways from recent reports. I come to this issue as a trained lawyer who spent the last decade working on human rights, with a special focus on the issues of "business and human rights" and human rights online. I have seen how the international human rights (IHR) framework can enable better understanding and contestation of human rights norms, monitor and mitigate the risk of human rights abuses, generate input and output legitimacy, and facilitate trust and coalition-building.