AI Poses Worldwide Threat to Human Dignity, Legal Expert Warns
DARWIN, AUSTRALIA – Artificial intelligence, despite rapid advancements, lacks genuine intelligence and poses a growing threat to human dignity and legal rights, according to Dr. Maria Randazzo,a legal scholar at Charles Darwin University. Her research highlights the difficulty individuals face in understanding and seeking justice when AI systems infringe upon their rights, a problem she believes will worsen without robust global regulation.
Dr. Randazzo’s findings, published April 23, 2025, in the Australian Journal of Human Rights (“Human dignity in the age of Artificial Intelligence: an overview of legal issues and regulatory regimes” DOI: 10.1080/1323238X.2025.2483822), underscore a critical distinction: AI excels at engineering but lacks the cognitive abilities inherent to human thought.
“AI is not intelligent in any human sense at all,” Dr. Randazzo stated. “It is a triumph in engineering,not in cognitive behavior. It has no clue what its doing or why – there’s no thought process as a human would understand it, just pattern recognition stripped of embodiment, memory, empathy, or wisdom.”
The challenge, she explains, lies in the opacity of AI systems, making it difficult for individuals to determine if and how their rights have been violated. This opacity hinders effective legal recourse.
Currently,global approaches to AI governance diverge significantly.The United states favors a market-centric model, China a state-centric one, and the European Union a human-centric approach. Dr. Randazzo advocates for the EU’s human-centric model as the most effective path to safeguarding human dignity,but stresses the need for worldwide adoption.
“Globally, if we don’t anchor AI development to what makes us human – our capacity to choose, to feel, to reason with care, to empathy and compassion – we risk creating systems that devalue and flatten humanity into data points, rather than improve the human condition,” she warned. “Humankind must not be treated as a means to an end.”
This paper is the first in a trilogy Dr.Randazzo is producing on the intersection of AI, law, and human rights.
