AI4IA Conference Report 2023

The UNESCO Information For All Programme (IFAP) Working Group on Information Accessibility (WGIA) hosted its fourth online, one-day conference on 28 September 2023. The event was organized in collaboration with the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Alberta, Canada; the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii); the Centre for New Economic Diplomacy (CNED) at ORF, India; and the Broadcasting Commission of Jamaica, all under the auspices of the UNESCO Cluster Office for the Caribbean and the UNESCO Regional Office for Southern Africa. AI can be very beneficial to society, but if abused, it can cause harm. It is therefore necessary to understand how AI can be made inclusive, enabling the widest cross-section of society to benefit. This event provided a platform for open discourse involving participants from academia, civil society, the private sector, and government. Participants explored a range of issues including: AI and Participatory Democracy; AI and War; AI and the Environment; The Convergence of AI and Neuro-technology; AI and Law; Implications of Large Language Models; Gendered Perspectives on AI; Culture, Indigenous Societies, and Data Sovereignty; Data Scraping and Exploitation; Digital Rights of Children; the Use of AI to Overcome Disabilities and Deliver Access; AI and Longtermism; AI and Health; the Intersection of AI, Art, and Human Creativity; and the Governance of AI, including Tensions Around the Concepts of Freedom of Expression and Information Accessibility.