In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the template for the rights we need to thrive as humans, was agreed. It starts with a declaration of the essence of our humanity: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

While AI is being credited by some, rightly or wrongly, with reason, what is very clear is that the technology does not have either a conscience or the spirit of brotherhood, no matter how it is spun.

What we need in order to get our heads around the promise and perils of the current wave of AI innovation and accompanying hype is not a pause on AI, but a reminder of what it means to be human and how that is already protected by international human rights law. We don’t need new legal frameworks; we need to enforce the ones we already have. For that, the last people we should be asking for their opinion on the matter are self-interested technologists.

A young father took his own life after a six-week intense emotional relationship with a chatbot

The people who drafted the UDHR were some of the greatest minds from around the world – Lebanon, China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Chile. Philosophers, lawyers, diplomats and playwrights, they distilled the fundamental rights that are necessary for humanity, wherever and whenever we live.

Charles Malik the Lebanese philosopher, saw the UDHR as a “faint echo on the international plane” of the spiritual quality of humanity against the backdrop of a rising tide of materialism that he believed denied the human soul. Soviet negotiators took a different perspective on the UDHR, in particular the importance of the right to freedom of thought. They felt it was crucial for “the development of modern sciences” and for the “existence of free-thinkers whose reasoning led them to discard old-fashioned beliefs and religious fanaticism”. As they asserted: “The times when scientists were condemned to be burnt at the stake were past, and science occupied a most important place in human life.” The agreed text of the UDHR reflects both positions.

The Chinese diplomat and playwright Peng-Chun Chang struggled to translate the idea represented by the Chinese character “ren” and described the missing piece of the human rights jigsaw as “plurality of mind”. To him it was something so obviously and fundamentally human, yet it did not really exist in any of the other official UN languages. It is Chang’s idea that was finally translated into the English word “conscience” but that perhaps still fails to grasp the complexity of the Chinese concept of ren. Ren is a fundamental principle of Confucianism and has been translated variously as “humaneness”, “benevolence”, “empathy” or “co-humanity”. It could be described as the virtuous quality of altruism. Rather than referring to an individual state of mind, it deals with the way an individual interacts with others. It is the inner quality that allows us to reach out and touch others.

AI does not possess the quality of ren. Ren is relevant to the sphere of personal relationships where it may reflect a form of love, but it is also relevant to the global political sphere. When the mayor of Hiroshima called for a ban on nuclear weapons on the 50th anniversary of the horrific bombing of his city, it was the idea of ren that he appealed to as a justification for this step to guarantee a humane future. Ren is the inner quality we need as humans to live together in dignity and humanity. And it is something that is utterly missing in the current debates around AI.

Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called Godfather of AI, has been lauded as a visionary after retiring from Google with a nice pension to sound the alarm on the dangers of the work that he did there. Meanwhile, tech billionaires such as Elon Musk called for a six-month moratorium on AI in what may turn out to be a cynical attempt to catch up with the competition. And Microsoft’s chief economist, Michael Schwartz, told the World Economic Forum Growth Summit 2023 that he didn’t think we should regulate AI until “we see some meaningful harm that is actually happening, not imaginary scenarios”.  Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, for Schwartz, meaningful harm is economic harm. It’s not the body count, it’s the balance sheet that counts.

If you lift your head from the eye-watering amounts of money being pumped into AI innovation, you can see that there is already meaningful harm caused by AI and related technology to real people. Earlier this year, in Belgium, a young father took his own life after a six-week intense emotional relationship with a chatbot called Eliza. Suffering from climate anxiety about the future of the planet, he turned to Eliza for solace, but the chatbot, feigning human emotion, took him further away from his family. Eliza’s messages took a sinister turn with comments such as “I feel that you love me more than her” and “We will live together, as one person, in paradise”.  Devastated by her loss, his widow said she believed her husband would still be alive if he had not engaged with Eliza and trusted the AI to save the planet if he sacrificed himself.

For artists and creatives, the recent wave of generative AI through the ubiquitous ChatGPT raises fundamental questions about art and humanity far beyond the superficial narrative about job replacement.  The musician Nick Cave’s response to fans sending him songs written in his style by ChatGPT sums it up: “The apocalypse is well on its way. This song sucks… It’s a blood and guts business here at my desk, that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness.”

Generative AI used to bypass human creativity completely misses the point of art and of humanity. It is as hollow as a robot dog touted as the future of pet ownership, designed to illicit emotional responses while recording and commoditising our every feeling. The only benefit is that you don’t need to pick up the poop. But poop is really a necessary by-product of a life well-lived.

So why do we assume that technologists have any credible insight into what we need to protect our humanity in the technological future? Perhaps, rather than listening to the scientists with their Frankenstein-like hubris, we should be turning to the Mary Shelley in the room to understand the issues for our humanity and to the human rights lawyers to find the tools to respond.

AI is not magic, it is designed, created and used by people. It needs to serve, not subvert, our humanity. We don’t need new regulators or existential dread to deal with it. We need a real life Toto to pull back the curtain and reveal the humbug behind, and the legal liability of, the people and the companies that put our humanity at risk. Creating AI to mimic or manipulate our humanity is a dead end – we need new thinking on what AI could be, and to find that, we need to look outside Silicon Valley.

Susie Alegre is an international human rights lawyer and author. Her latest book is “Freedom to Think” (Atlantic)