UNESCO’s AI literacy training for civil servants has highlighted the importance of public-sector capacity in responsible AI governance.
The programme focuses on AI ethics, governance, risk management and responsible use, rather than only on productivity tools or prompt-writing skills.
UNESCO said many participants initially expected practical training on AI tools, but later connected issues such as accountability, transparency, bias, procurement and oversight to their own public-sector responsibilities.
The experience showed that meaningful human oversight depends not only on technical safeguards inside AI systems, but also on the capacity of officials involved in procuring, deploying, regulating and monitoring those systems.
UNESCO said participants often finished the programme with more questions than they had at the beginning. The organisation framed that as a sign of growing awareness of the complexity of AI governance, not as a lack of understanding.
Localisation also proved important. Through the AI Ethics Experts Without Borders network, training was adapted to national contexts and delivered in languages used by officials in their daily work, including cohorts in Egypt and Tunisia.
UNESCO said AI literacy should be seen as a foundation for broader institutional readiness, including risk assessment methods, procurement guidance, monitoring processes, internal governance structures and cross-government coordination.
Why does it matter?
AI governance often focuses on principles, laws and technical safeguards, but implementation depends on the officials who must apply those tools in practice. Civil servants involved in procurement, regulation, service delivery and oversight need enough AI literacy to ask informed questions, identify risks and challenge vendor or institutional assumptions. Without that capacity, “human oversight” can become a procedural checkbox rather than a meaningful accountability mechanism.
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Portugal has presented AMALIA, its first open language model developed in European Portuguese, as part of a wider effort to strengthen national AI capacity and modernise the public sector.
Prime Minister Luís Montenegro said the project shows Portugal’s ability to develop advanced technology and contribute to Europe’s strategic autonomy.
AMALIA, short for Automatic Artificial Intelligence Multimodal Language Assistant, was developed by a consortium of Portuguese universities and research centres.
The project received an initial €5.5 million through Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Facility, with a further €1.5 million planned for a new development phase in 2027.
Available as open code, AMALIA is intended to allow public administration bodies, companies, universities and research centres to develop their own applications.
The government says the model can support customer service, administrative process automation, knowledge management and decision-making across public services.
The AMALIA website says the project is designed to promote European Portuguese, preserve Portuguese cultural representation and support data sovereignty by enabling AI use in public administration without sensitive data leaving national territory.
The model is also expected to support use cases in education, culture and museums, media and science.
Why does it matter?
AMALIA addresses a gap in AI language infrastructure by focusing specifically on European Portuguese, a language variety often underrepresented or conflated with Brazilian Portuguese in multilingual AI systems. Open access also matters because it allows public bodies, universities and companies to adapt the model rather than relying only on closed commercial tools. The project fits a broader European debate on AI sovereignty, where governments are seeking domestic or regional capabilities in language models, data governance and public-sector AI infrastructure.
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The United Nations opened its first Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva, calling for inclusive, evidence-based and practical international cooperation to ensure that AI supports development while addressing risks related to safety, inequality, disinformation, children’s rights and human oversight.
The inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance is taking place on 6–7 July, alongside the AI for Good Global Summit and the WSIS Forum. Established in 2025, the dialogue is intended to provide a platform for governments and relevant stakeholders to discuss international cooperation, share good practices and support open, transparent and inclusive discussions on AI governance.
Opening the session, Ambassador Egriselda López of El Salvador, one of the dialogue’s co-chairs, described the meeting as the beginning of a broader process rather than a one-off event. She said Geneva should be seen not only as a place of arrival, but as a point of departure for continued work on AI governance.
López stressed that meaningful participation requires more than a seat in the room. Countries also need skills, infrastructure, financing, institutions and partnerships to shape and benefit from AI. Her co-chair, Ambassador Rein Tammsaar of Estonia, said AI is already affecting every country, regardless of its level of technological development, and that governance discussions must therefore include all regions, levels of development and relevant stakeholders.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that AI is advancing at ‘runaway speed’ and is being deployed faster than institutions can manage. He said AI is already reshaping economies, labour markets, elections and security, while society is facing what he described as an experiment being run ‘without a plan’ and ‘without consent’.
Guterres identified three major risks highlighted by scientific evidence: the speed of AI deployment, the concentration of power in a small number of companies and countries, and the erosion of truth through AI-enabled misinformation. He warned that computing power, data and talent remain concentrated, leaving many countries, particularly developing ones, with limited influence over technologies that may shape their futures.
At the same time, Guterres emphasised AI’s potential to support development, including in healthcare, education and agriculture. If shared widely, he said, AI could help make expertise more accessible and become a ‘great equaliser’ of the twenty-first century.
The Secretary-General outlined four priorities for international action: common safety standards, clear red lines grounded in human rights, stronger capacity-building for developing countries and greater transparency about AI’s environmental footprint. He also called for an AI child safety pledge, a global fund and network for AI capacity-building, and an international legal ban on lethal autonomous weapons, which he referred to as ‘killer robots’.
Annalena Baerbock, President of the UN General Assembly, said AI is developing at a pace that does not allow governments the time they had with earlier technological revolutions. She argued that AI cannot be governed by a few actors alone and must be addressed through the UN with participation from all countries and stakeholders.
Baerbock also highlighted harmful uses of AI, including deepfakes and gendered abuse. She said such abuses disproportionately target women and girls and described them as part of a broader challenge to human rights. At the same time, she pointed to AI’s potential to support the Sustainable Development Goals, including through disaster warning, agriculture, health and education.
Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union, framed the opening as part of a wider ‘Geneva Digital Week’ that brings together the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, the work of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, the AI for Good Global Summit and the WSIS Forum. She contrasted the current pace of AI governance discussions with the early years of the internet, noting that the UN has moved more quickly to convene global dialogue on generative AI.
Khaled El-Enany of UNESCO focused on implementation, saying that a gap remains between principles and practice. He highlighted UNESCO’s 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence as a global standard for aligning AI with human rights, sustainability and inclusion. He said UNESCO is supporting more than 80 countries in strengthening legal frameworks, institutional capacities and accountability mechanisms, and noted that over 50,000 civil servants and judicial actors have benefited from UNESCO-supported AI training.
El-Enany also said UNESCO is launching a collective reflection on a new global normative instrument to safeguard children and young people in the age of AI and digital technologies.
Amandeep Singh Gill, UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies, underlined the scale of participation in the dialogue, noting representation from more than 170 countries alongside scientists, entrepreneurs, civil society, international organisations and technical communities. He said inclusion in AI governance cannot be treated as a one-off exercise, adding that without capacity, ‘dialogues are monologues and science is just abstract’.
The opening session showed broad agreement that AI governance should be inclusive, evidence-based, rights-oriented and supported by practical capacity-building. Speakers repeatedly stressed that AI’s potential benefits for development, education, health and agriculture must be matched by safeguards on safety, accountability, children’s rights, truth, environmental sustainability and human oversight.
Tammsaar closed the opening by saying the discussion had highlighted both AI’s opportunities and the need for stronger international cooperation to ensure that the technology contributes to sustainable development, inclusion and shared prosperity. The meeting then moved to the presentation of the preliminary report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence.
Track all key moments from the Global Dialogue on AI Governance inaugural meeting on our dedicated page.
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The future of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) took centre stage at the WSIS Forum 2026, where policymakers, former diplomats, technical experts and internet governance practitioners discussed how the forum should evolve following the UN’s decision to grant it a permanent mandate.
Speakers agreed that the challenge is no longer whether the IGF should continue, but how it can become more relevant, effective and responsive to emerging issues such as AI while preserving its multistakeholder character. The discussion focused on four broad priorities, such as strengthening government participation, improving intersessional work, deepening links with national and regional IGF initiatives (NRIs), and ensuring the forum has sufficient institutional capacity and sustainable funding.
Governments need a stronger role without changing the IGF’s character
A recurring theme was how to increase meaningful government participation without transforming the IGF into a traditional intergovernmental negotiation forum.
Anriette Esterhuysen, human rights defender and computer networking pioneer from South Africa, argued that governments must participate more actively, particularly to strengthen digital policymaking in developing countries, but warned against reducing their involvement to formal speeches by senior officials.
Instead, she said governments should engage openly on practical policy challenges that require collaboration with the wider internet governance community.
Former Latvian ambassador Janis Karklins echoed this view, arguing that governments would only dedicate time and resources to the IGF if it addressed issues directly relevant to their national priorities.
Planning for the upcoming IGF in Nairobi, he suggested, should take into account the policy needs of African governments to ensure the forum delivers practical value.
Jennifer Chung, Chair of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG), also stressed that the initiative should be understood as a ‘government dialogue with stakeholders’ rather than a separate government track, preserving the IGF’s long-standing multistakeholder model.
Meanwhile, IGF Programme and Technology Manager Chengetai Masango said discussions on the exact format remain ongoing, with organisers considering how the dialogue could build on existing high-level sessions rather than creating an entirely new structure.
Stronger outcomes through year-round collaboration
Participants also debated how the IGF could produce more tangible results while remaining a platform for dialogue rather than negotiations.
Konstantinos Komaitis opened the discussion by asking how the IGF could move beyond its reputation as a ‘talking shop’ without becoming another UN negotiating process.
Esterhuysen argued that achieving greater impact requires changing the way the IGF works rather than changing its mandate. She suggested more structured intersessional work, thematic synthesis and longer-term collaboration on priority issues instead of relying primarily on standalone workshops during the annual meeting.
Andrea Calderaro, Director of Cyber Diplomacy at the EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), similarly argued that the most valuable work happens between annual IGF meetings, with governments and stakeholders conducting national consultations and bringing those experiences into global discussions.
Masango defended dialogue as the forum’s core purpose, but agreed that stronger follow-up and more practical outputs are needed. He said previous initiatives, including voluntary commitments, had not always been sufficiently tracked or incorporated into future work.
National and regional IGFs seen as a growing strength
Speakers also highlighted the growing importance of national, regional and youth Internet Governance Forums, which now number more than 180 worldwide.
Esterhuysen welcomed their explicit recognition in the WSIS+20 outcome document, describing them as one of the IGF’s greatest successes.
Chung said the relationship between the global IGF and NRIs should evolve beyond annual event coordination towards continuous thematic collaboration and shared learning throughout the year.
She noted particularly strong growth among youth initiatives, especially in Africa and Asia, arguing that younger participants increasingly want meaningful involvement in shaping Internet governance discussions rather than symbolic participation.
Esterhuysen proposed a two-way model in which the global IGF identifies concrete policy questions, NRIs and intersessional groups examine them throughout the year, and the Secretariat synthesises the results into practical, non-negotiated policy options for governments and other stakeholders.
Permanent mandate brings new expectations
The discussion also touched on longer-term institutional questions, including funding and Secretariat capacity.
Although speakers acknowledged that financial sustainability remains an important challenge, they agreed that the immediate priority is preparing a successful IGF meeting in Nairobi while gradually implementing reforms in the years ahead.
Calderaro argued that the IGF should increasingly serve as a hub connecting the growing number of international digital governance processes rather than functioning only as an annual conference.
Esterhuysen also urged the forum to become more willing to address politically sensitive issues, including corporate accountability, arguing that its permanent mandate provides an opportunity to take on more substantive policy debates.
Closing the session, participants broadly agreed that the IGF’s future lies not in becoming a negotiating body, but in strengthening dialogue, improving policy-relevant outputs, deepening collaboration across national and regional initiatives, and ensuring governments, civil society, academia, the private sector and technical communities remain equally engaged as internet governance continues to evolve.
A WSIS Forum 2026 session on digital citizenship examined how governments, regulators, international organisations, and technical communities can help people participate safely and meaningfully in digital society as AI becomes more widely used.
The discussion took place during the WSIS Forum 2026, held in Geneva from 6 to 10 July. The annual multistakeholder forum, co-organised by ITU, UNESCO, UNDP, and UNCTAD, brings together governments, international organisations, civil society, the private sector, academia, and technical communities to advance implementation of the WSIS Action Lines and support digital cooperation.
Opening the session, Alik Mikaelian, project specialist at UNDP Egypt, said digital citizenship can no longer be understood only as internet access. Although billions of people are now online, she argued that meaningful participation requires the ability to think critically, understand rights and responsibilities, navigate AI-enabled environments, and engage safely in digital society. She also linked digital citizenship to trusted institutions, resilient infrastructure, and cooperation among governments, the private sector, civil society, and technical communities.
Dr Hoda Baraka, advisor to Egypt’s Minister of ICT for Technology Talent Development and a Professor of Computer Engineering at Cairo University, presented Egypt’s approach to digital citizenship, describing a digitally empowered citizen as someone able to ‘access, understand, use, create, and benefit from digital technologies’ in a safe, ethical, productive, and inclusive way. She said Egypt’s Digital Egypt agenda combines infrastructure expansion, digital government services, digital literacy, skills programmes, online safety, and support for persons with disabilities.
Baraka said Egypt is working across different age groups and professional communities, including school pupils, university students, graduates, public servants, parents, educators, and persons with disabilities. She highlighted initiatives such as Digital Egypt Marvel Schools and the Digital Egypt Cubs Initiative, as well as programmes for advanced skills and public-sector readiness. She added that online safety is becoming increasingly important due to misinformation, deepfakes, privacy risks, and threats to personal data.
Dr Abeer Shakweer, speaking from UNDP Egypt’s perspective, said the focus should shift from simply combating misinformation to strengthening information integrity. She argued that citizens need critical thinking skills and the capacity to make informed decisions in AI-shaped information environments.
Shakweer described a three-pillar UNDP programme in Egypt. The first pillar addresses misinformation and disinformation through an assessment of the information ecosystem and a bilingual Arabic-English toolkit for youth and journalists. She said the toolkit had been used to train more than 120 young people and 25 journalism trainers. The second pillar explores how AI can be used both to spread and to counter false information, while the third embeds capacity development across public-facing digital programmes, including digital transformation, digital public infrastructure, and future intelligence.
Krisstina Rao focused on digital public infrastructure (DPI), describing it as shared, reusable infrastructure that supports services across government rather than separate systems developed by individual ministries or departments. She cited digital identity, payment systems, and consent-based data exchange as examples.
Rao said governments cannot build complex DPI systems alone and need early collaboration with stakeholders who can contribute expertise on inclusion, safety, accountability, and adoption. She warned that if countries continue maintaining both digital and analogue systems, because many people remain excluded, costs remain high, and the full value of DPI is reduced. She referred to examples, including Brazil’s PIX forum and Ethiopia’s early collaboration with UNHCR to connect digital identity systems with refugee registration.
Dr Chafic Chaya stressed that digital citizenship should not be separated from internet infrastructure. He said discussions often focus on individual behaviour, such as staying safe online or protecting data, but that meaningful participation also depends on resilient connectivity, reliable platforms, and secure environments. He added that this is particularly important in the Global South, where access may expand faster than resilience and capacity development.
Her Excellency Lara Khateeb brought a regulatory perspective, saying rules must remain flexible and adaptive because technology changes quickly. She said Jordan benchmarks international practices and uses public consultation to make regulations more workable. She described this as a form of ‘reverse engineering’, starting from available technologies and practical solutions before shaping rules around them.
Khateeb cited Jordan’s work on child online protection as an example, explaining that regulators consulted telecom operators about available technical solutions and international platforms about how those systems interact. She also emphasised data protection, coordination with cybersecurity agencies, and awareness campaigns tailored to different groups, including children, women, businesses, and SMEs.
Nicholas Field highlighted the role of young people in digital citizenship. Drawing on work with Omidyar Network and UNICEF, he said young people often want to engage and are ready to contribute, but are frequently treated as an afterthought in policymaking. He noted that they often help older family members use digital services and argued that governments should reach them through the channels they actually use, including influencers, YouTube, and podcasts.
Field also raised the issue of AI skills among teachers, saying educators cannot be expected to guide responsible AI use if they do not understand the technology themselves. He said institutions should not assume students will avoid AI tools, but should instead define clear parameters for responsible and acceptable use.
The session also discussed sandboxes as practical tools for testing digital systems before full deployment. Field described sandboxes as time-bound technical environments created for a specific learning purpose. He said they can help regulators, companies, and citizens build trust through safe experimentation. He cited the French identity sandbox, which contributed to work around interoperable digital identity, and the GovStack interoperability sandbox, which tests components such as ID, consent, registers, messaging, and workflow.
Shakweer later shifted the discussion from citizens to institutions, arguing that digital transformation requires public bodies to assess their own readiness and invest in capacity development. She said UNDP uses digital and AI readiness assessment tools to help organisations understand their current position and develop practical roadmaps. In Egypt, she said, such assessments had been applied with the Ministry of Justice and started with the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority.
Returning to AI governance, Al-Khateeb said regulators should encourage responsible AI use rather than ban it. She criticised approaches that prohibit AI use outright, arguing that people should instead be taught to use the technology responsibly, including by checking sources and understanding risks. She also described how Jordan’s Telecommunications Regulatory Commission uses an internal AI system, not connected to the internet, to search regulations and decisions and support regulatory work.
Baraka closed the discussion by outlining Egypt’s responsible AI work. She said Egypt has an ethical charter, a governance framework, guidelines for developers and deployers, and procurement guidance for public institutions buying AI systems. However, she stressed that frameworks alone are not enough and that institutions need practical tools to apply them before and after deployment.
She also highlighted Egypt’s emerging AI Audit Lab, developed with support from UNDP, GSMA, GIZ, and WebSphere, as a way to help move from principles to implementation. The lab is intended to support Egyptian programmers, developers, and SMEs in testing and building responsible AI systems, including around fairness, accountability, transparency, openness, interoperability, and explainability.
Across the session, speakers agreed that digital citizenship in the AI era requires more than connectivity. It depends on critical thinking, trusted public institutions, secure infrastructure, inclusive DPI, flexible regulation, AI literacy, online safety, and practical tools that allow citizens and institutions to use digital technologies responsibly.
Members of the European Parliament are set to question the European Commission on its latest AI and cybersecurity proposals, including a new AI cybersecurity strategy expected to be unveiled on 7 July.
According to the European Parliament’s plenary newsletter, the Commission’s action plan is expected to include measures to help EU member states and companies address AI-related cybersecurity risks.
The strategy is also expected to strengthen Europe’s AI cybersecurity capabilities as policymakers examine how AI is reshaping both cyber threats and cyber defence.
The debate follows the European Commission’s welcome of the G7 cybersecurity declaration on strengthening global cyber resilience. Parliament is also considering two legislative proposals collectively referred to as the ‘Cybersecurity Act 2‘.
The debate is scheduled for 7 July, as part of a European Commission statement followed by parliamentary scrutiny.
Why does it matter?
The debate shows that AI-related cybersecurity risks are becoming part of the EU’s broader cyber resilience agenda. By linking AI policy with NIS2, ENISA, certification and supply chain security, the EU is preparing to treat AI not only as an innovation priority but also as a cybersecurity concern.
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Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have adopted a Ministerial Declaration and a regional roadmap on AI ethics for 2026–2027.
The documents were adopted at the Third Ministerial Summit and High-Level Authorities Meeting on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Latin America and the Caribbean, held in the Dominican Republic.
The summit was organised by UNESCO, the Government of the Dominican Republic, the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean and other partners, with support from the European Union.
The roadmap sets priorities for technical cooperation, the exchange of regulatory experience and stronger institutional capacities for ethical and responsible AI policy.
It builds on earlier regional declarations adopted in Santiago in 2023 and Montevideo in 2024, moving the regional process from shared principles towards implementation.
The roadmap frames AI as a cross-cutting public policy issue, calling for participation from sectors including education, health, the economy, culture, the environment, justice, planning, budgeting and subnational government.
Participating states also identified capacity development as a regional priority, including digital literacy and training for public officials, educators, judicial practitioners, journalists, researchers, businesses and citizens.
The process will continue through five regional working groups, expanded technical exchanges and closer coordination with other international AI governance initiatives.
Why does it matter?
The roadmap gives Latin America and the Caribbean a more structured way to coordinate AI policy across countries, rather than developing national approaches in isolation. Its value will depend on whether regional working groups can turn broad ethical commitments into practical tools, stronger public institutions and shared regulatory capacity. The focus on education, environment, public administration and subnational government also shows that AI governance is being treated as a whole-of-society policy issue, not only a technology-sector concern.
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The United Nations’ Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence has published its first preliminary report, providing an evidence-based assessment of AI’s opportunities, risks, and societal impacts ahead of next week’s inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva. Rather than prescribing specific policies, the report aims to inform international discussions by providing an independent scientific foundation for AI governance decision-making.
Established by the UN General Assembly in August 2025 following commitments made in the Global Digital Compact, the panel brings together 40 independent experts from academia, civil society, the private sector, and the technical community. It is the first permanent UN scientific body dedicated exclusively to assessing the development and societal implications of AI. The report will serve as a key input to the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, which takes place on 6–7 July alongside the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum and the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva.
The preliminary report examines AI through four broad dimensions:
Scientific and technological developments;
Opportunities for sustainable development;
Emerging risks;
Approaches to international governance.
Instead of advocating a particular regulatory model, the panel seeks to establish a shared evidence base that can support future policymaking and international cooperation on AI.
Rather than focusing solely on risks, the report examines AI’s growing role across sectors, including healthcare, education, agriculture, scientific research, and public administration. It describes AI as a general-purpose technology with the potential to accelerate innovation, improve productivity, and expand access to knowledge and public services. At the same time, the panel notes that these benefits remain unevenly distributed across countries and regions, with significant disparities in access to computing infrastructure, technical expertise, and digital resources.
The report estimates that more than one billion people now use AI-powered services each week, while frontier AI capabilities remain concentrated among a relatively small number of companies and countries. According to the panel, this concentration extends beyond AI models themselves to include computing infrastructure, specialised hardware, large-scale datasets, and technical talent, raising broader questions about equitable access to AI and the distribution of its benefits.
The panel also highlights the challenges facing developing countries, warning that many risk becoming primarily consumers rather than producers of AI technologies if investment in local infrastructure, research ecosystems, digital skills, and governance capacity does not keep pace with global developments. It identifies multilingual AI, locally relevant datasets, and stronger scientific capabilities as important factors in ensuring that AI systems better reflect diverse societies and languages rather than reinforcing existing global disparities.
Alongside these opportunities, the report identifies a range of emerging risks associated with increasingly capable AI systems. These include the use of AI for cyberattacks, fraud, disinformation, election interference, and other malicious activities, as well as broader concerns related to market concentration, transparency, and the growing dependence of many countries on a limited number of AI providers. The panel also notes that many governments currently lack the technical capacity to evaluate the most advanced frontier AI models independently.
Beyond security-related concerns, the report identifies environmental sustainability as an increasingly important governance issue. It notes that the rapid expansion of AI requires increasing amounts of computing power, electricity, water, and specialised hardware, and argues that future AI development should balance technological progress with efficient resource use and broader sustainable development objectives.
Speaking at the report’s launch, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that the pace of AI development requires stronger international cooperation grounded in scientific evidence and inclusive dialogue.
Panel co-chair Maria Ressa described the publication as an independent scientific assessment designed to inform, rather than replace, intergovernmental decision-making. The report itself states that ‘effective AI governance requires international cooperation,’ while recognising that governance approaches will continue to reflect different national circumstances and policy priorities.
The publication marks the first major output of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI since its establishment under the Global Digital Compact. Future reports are expected to provide regular scientific assessments of AI capabilities, impacts, and governance challenges as the technology continues to evolve.
Why does it matter?
As governments, international organisations, researchers, and industry representatives gather in Geneva next week for the inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance, the preliminary report is expected to provide an important reference point for discussions on the future of AI. By combining scientific evidence with a broad assessment of opportunities, risks, and governance considerations, it seeks to support a more informed international conversation on how AI can contribute to sustainable development, human rights, and shared global prosperity.
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Ask an image-generation model to create a CEO, a software engineer, or a successful entrepreneur, and chances are the result will be male. Ask for a nurse, a personal assistant, or a caregiver, and a woman is far more likely to appear.
Such outputs have fuelled growing concerns about gender bias in AI and the broader relationship between women and synthetic intelligence. Yet a more complicated question lies beneath the surface: are AI systems creating these stereotypes, or are they simply learning them from society?
AI learns patterns, not values
AI is not neutral; it learns from historical and social data. From books and news archives to websites, social media posts, and workplace statistics, modern AI systems are trained on enormous quantities of human-generated content. If society has historically associated men with leadership and women with caregiving, AI is likely to learn those associations as statistical patterns. The real challenge emerges when these patterns are reproduced millions of times every day, shaping perceptions of what is normal, expected, or achievable.
The debate surrounding gender bias in AI is therefore not only about technology. It is also about how existing inequalities are translated into digital systems and whether AI ultimately reinforces or challenges them.
image via Magnific
How AI systems learn and reproduce gender bias
AI has often been portrayed as objective, rational, and free from human prejudice. Reality is more complicated. Machine learning models do not distinguish between desirable and undesirable social patterns. Their purpose is to identify relationships within data and use them to make predictions or generate outputs.
A landmark 2017 study published in Sciencedemonstrated that AI language models learned many of the same implicit biases found among humans. Researchers discovered that word associations frequently linked men with careers, science, and leadership, while women were more closely associated with family and domestic roles. Importantly, the systems were not instructed to adopt these views. They simply learned them from the data available to them.
From a machine-learning perspective, stereotypes are not recognised as stereotypes. They are recognised as recurring patterns.
That distinction matters. AI does not understand concepts such as fairness, equality, or discrimination. It understands probabilities. If particular associations dominate books, websites, news reports, and online discussions, AI systems are likely to absorb those associations and reproduce them in their outputs.
Much of the discussion about women and AI begins here. Gender bias in AI is often less a product of malicious design and more a reflection of the social realities embedded in training data.
image via Magnific
How AI amplifies gender stereotypes and inequality
Many experts argue that AI acts as a mirror of society. In some respects, that assessment is correct. If men currently occupy a majority of senior corporate leadership positions, the AI model that frequently depicts CEOs as male may simply be reflecting existing labour-market realities.
However, reflection is only part of the story.
Historically, stereotypes have spread through institutions, media, education systems, and interpersonal interactions. AI introduces a new dynamic because it operates at a scale no individual human can match. Search engines, recommendation systems, chatbots, virtual assistants, and generative AI platforms interact with millions of users simultaneously.
The concern, therefore, is not that AI can be biassed. Humans have always been biassed. The concern is that AI can replicate and distribute those biases with unprecedented speed, consistency, and reach.
A stereotype expressed by one individual has limited influence. A stereotype repeated by an algorithm millions of times can gradually shape expectations about who belongs in positions of authority, innovation, or expertise.
Questions surrounding AI and gender equality extend beyond technical accuracy. Even if an AI system reflects current realities, repeated exposure to those realities may reinforce the perception that they are natural, inevitable, or desirable.
image via Magnific
How AI systems portray women and gender roles
Evidence of gender stereotypes in AI has appeared across a wide range of technologies.
Image-generation systems have repeatedly associated women with caregiving and support roles while portraying men as executives, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and political leaders. Similar patterns have emerged in language models, search algorithms, and recommendation systems.
Such outputs raise concerns because representation influences perception. When leadership, technical expertise, and innovation are consistently presented through a male lens, AI may unintentionally reinforce assumptions about gender and professional capability.
Researchers often describe this phenomenon as representational harm. Unlike direct discrimination, representational harm does not necessarily involve financial loss or exclusion from opportunities. Instead, it affects how groups are perceived in society and how individuals understand their own potential.
For younger generations growing up alongside AI-powered technologies, these representations may become part of the digital environment through which social norms are learned. AI increasingly shapes the way people search for information, discover role models, and imagine future careers. As a result, the way women are portrayed by AI systems has implications that extend far beyond the technology sector itself.
image via Magnific
The gender bias feedback loop in AI
One of the most important concepts in discussions about gender bias in AI is the feedback loop.
Society creates patterns and inequalities.
These patterns are recorded in digital data.
AI learns from that data.
AI systems reproduce these patterns in their outputs.
People consume these outputs and may internalise them.
New data is generated that reflects the same assumptions.
The cycle then repeats itself.
Viewed through this lens, AI becomes part of a system through which existing inequalities can be continuously reproduced and normalised.
Understanding this feedback loop shifts the debate away from the simple question of whether AI is biassed. A more important question emerges: what happens when social inequalities become embedded in technologies that many people perceive as objective and trustworthy?
That question sits at the heart of contemporary debates surrounding AI ethics, responsible AI development, and digital governance.
image via Magnific
Why women in AI governance and development still matter
Discussions about gender bias in AI often focus on the underrepresentation of women in AI and the broader technology sector. While diversity remains an important issue, it should not be viewed as a simple explanation for biassed outputs.
Increasing the number of women working in AI would not automatically eliminate stereotypes from the training data. Models trained on historical information would still learn many of the same social patterns.
However, representation becomes significant at the level of governance.
Decisions about whether biassed outputs should be corrected, contextualised, or left unchanged are ultimately human decisions. Diverse teams may be better positioned to identify harms that homogeneous groups overlook and to challenge assumptions that might otherwise remain embedded in AI systems.
The importance of women in AI, therefore, extends beyond mere representation. It relates to participation in the governance structures that determine how AI is developed, evaluated, and deployed.
The questions about fairness, accountability, and responsible AI are not purely technical. They are social and political questions that require a broad range of perspectives.
image via Magnific
The future of gender equality in AI
AI is frequently described as a transformative technology, yet its most disruptive impact may not be what it creates, but what it reveals. For centuries, societies have debated equality through laws, institutions, and cultural norms. AI introduces a different form of scrutiny. By converting human behaviour into data and data into predictions, it exposes patterns that often remain invisible until they are reflected back at scale.
In that sense, debates about women and AI are not merely debates about technology. They are discussions about who gets represented in the collective knowledge, whose experiences become part of the historical record, and which assumptions are treated as facts simply because they have been repeated often enough. As societies increasingly rely on algorithms to organise information and inform decisions, the line between what is statistically common and what is socially acceptable may become one of the defining questions of the digital age.
AI may never tell society what is right. Yet by revealing the patterns embedded in human history, it is forcing a deeper question: when machines learn from us, what exactly are we teaching them?
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The Council of the European Union has adopted conclusions calling for stronger action to protect girls and young women from cyber violence, urging member states and the European Commission to reinforce prevention, enforcement, and victim support.
Findings from the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) show that girls and young women are disproportionately affected by cyber violence, including online harassment, cyberstalking, non-consensual sharing of intimate images and sexist hate speech. Interviews with teenagers across the EU also suggest many believe existing prevention efforts are inadequate.
The Council called for improved access to mental health services, legal assistance and educational programmes covering digital consent, online safety and gender-responsive digital literacy. It also recommended providing parents and educators with practical guidance and training to help identify and respond to online abuse.
The Council also stressed the need for stronger enforcement of existing legislation, including the Digital Services Act and AI Act, while urging online platforms to take greater responsibility for user safety. It further called for increased investment in law enforcement resources, cross-border cooperation and research into the causes and impact of cyber violence.
Why does it matter?
The Council’s conclusions recognise cyber violence as both an online safety challenge and a barrier to gender equality and digital inclusion. By combining prevention, victim support, stronger enforcement and platform accountability, the EU is signalling that tackling online abuse requires coordinated action across governments, technology companies and civil society.
The recommendations also reinforce the EU’s broader digital governance agenda. Linking cyber violence to legislation such as the Digital Services Act and AI Act demonstrates how existing regulatory frameworks are increasingly being used to address online harms alongside technological innovation.
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