The Perfect Storm: Connecting Tech, AI & Warfare was a meetup about how AI is changing the way conflicts are managed, and human rights violations are recorded.

Artificial Intelligence is changing the way conflicts are managed and human rights violations are recorded. Wars are now laboratories to test new lethal autonomous weapons, advanced recognition systems, biometric surveillance, and AI-based programmes to identify targets on the ground. But AI and digital technologies can also facilitate the exposure of war crimes, and aid forensic organisations in identifying those responsible for war crimes and human rights violations. At the same time, the rise of synthetic images is changing the relationship between the visual and the factual/fictional. What are the possible scenarios for AI and synthetic imagery on the gathering of evidence and the establishment of a system of truth in our societies? This meetup combined presentations on these topics with a Q&A session that opened the floor to the audience to discuss these questions.

Marwa Fatafta (PS/DE) leads Access Now’s policy and advocacy work on digital rights in the Middle East and North Africa region. Her work spans a number of issues at the nexus of human rights and technology including content governance and platform accountability, online censorship, digital surveillance, and transnational repression.

Hadi Al Khatib (SY/DE) is the Managing Director of Mnemonic and the founder of the Syrian Archive. He has worked since 2011 to collect, verify, and investigate citizen-generated data as evidence of human rights violations.

Enrico De Angelis (IT) works on new media and the public sphere in Syria and Egypt, but also on grassroots media, political communication and journalism in the Middle East and North Africa region.

Part of Re-Imagine Europe: New Perspectives for Action. Co-funded by the European Union.

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