Artificial intelligence may be creating value for people, but people-centric development is of paramount importance, reiterated experts who spoke at a panel discussion on ‘Generative AI at the Our Digital Futures Fest’, held by IT for Change.
Sabina Dewan, founder and executive director at JustJobs Network, questioned the foundational notion based on which the ill effects of Gen AI are often overlooked.
She stressed on the importance of strict regulations in terms of labour protection and social security and the need to reform educational and skill systems in a manner so as to meet people where they are.
“There is this fictional idea that people can just be reskilled, and they will be able to partake in the AI-driven economy. Reality doesn’t work that way. We need to build institutions and social architecture that work for worker protection, skill training systems, social security systems, and labour regulations that are implemented,” Ms. Dewan said.
Benefit for who?
Anita Gurumurthy, founding member and executive director of IT for Change and moderator of the session, said that there were concerns about the extractivism of Gen AI, its huge ecological footprint and the collective cognitive decline that it is causing.
Brian Chen, policy director at Data & Society, suggested looking at the specific functions that AI is being used for as each function has a very different value proposition.
However, he noted that even if it could be established that AI offers a positive social value, it is important to realise that a large part of it would benefit the elite.
“We should be very clear that, as the AI political economy is constructed right now, the majority of that value is going to be captured by elites at the top of the value. There’s just too many natural monopolies, worker subordination and natural resource exhaustion to credibly produce the kind of shared economic prosperity that people are hoping to get out of AI,” he said.
Missing indigenous voice
José Renato Laranjeira de Pereira, PhD reseracher at University of Bonn – Sustainable AI Lab and cofounder at Laboratório de Políticas Públicas e Internet Laboratório de Políticas Públicas e Internet, threw light on the data extractivism that is happening in the age of AI.
Taking the case of Brazilian government which recently announced tax exemptions for the construction of data centres in the country, he noted there were instances of data centres being built on lands of indigenous people, hindering their access to basic natural resources, and reports of attacks on them to divert resources to tech giants.
“It is also very important to see the rise of Starlink in the country, especially in the Amazon and certain areas in the centre of the country, where connectivity has historically been sparse. Starlink is arriving there and extracting a lot of data from these communities. So, we are seeing what I’ve been understanding as a new frontier of the extraction – a new population is being brought to this data colonialism dynamics,” he said.
Transparency needed
Sai Rahul Poruri, chief executive officer at FOSS United Foundation, observed that while people are developing interesting use cases, demo products and experiments with Gen AI, things are also being hidden away by the industry.
“In the software industry, most good software players tell you when something goes wrong. For example, when there is a downtime. But how many of the AI chatbot providers or the LLMs of the generative AI systems disclose when a chatbot says something beyond the bounds of common behaviour?” he questioned.
“I wish more of the existing players self-reported,” he added, advocating for more transparency from companies.
Published – October 31, 2025 09:29 pm IST
