Christine Parker

Recent developments in platform governance have empowered regulators to require platforms to take down harmful and unlawful content such as the live streaming of violence and child sexual abuse material. However, platform responsibility for content that is health-demoting but not criminal or violent has been relatively neglected. This paper focuses on how platforms create advertising environments that promote unhealthy diets, which we label an ‘algorithmic determinant of health’. We propose a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to digital platform regulation that would require both governments and platforms to protect individuals from health demoting flows of food marketing content online. We use our HRBA to review the policies of twelve major advertiser-funded digital platforms regarding food marketing. We conclude they do not comply with platforms’ human rights obligations. Accordingly, governments should regulate platforms’ online advertising. We argue that initiatives like the UK Online Safety Act are too narrow for this purpose, and that the imposition of a digital duty of care on platforms, such as seen in the EU Digital Services Act, is a more promising step. While applied to food marketing in this paper, our HRBA is relevant to other health demoting marketing content online such as gambling and alcohol.

In their article ‘AI Alignment: The Case for Including Animals’, Tse et al. compellingly argue for extending alignment endeavours beyond humans to also protect sentient animals. They call for AI alignment with a ‘basic’ level of animal welfare. Since ‘basic’ alignment carries minimal human cost, they argue, it can be widely accepted and is thus currently more strategically appropriate than is pursuing advanced or ideal alignment with animal welfare. This commentary paper argues that ‘basic’ AI alignment for animals is sometimes insufficient. It makes the case that going beyond basic AI-animal alignment is both feasible and morally required in a variety of circumstances.

Artificial intelligence (AI) ethics guidelines make strong appeals for ensuring that AI benefits human beings without unjustifiably harming them. Yet these guidelines largely overlook AIs ethically relevant positive and negative impacts on sentient nonhuman animals. This paper argues that it is time to include sentient animals in AI ethics guidelines produced by governments, supranational and intergovernmental bodies, NGOs, academics, professional groups, for-profit corporations, and the like. AI ethics guidelines should explicitly and adequately include values and principles that protect and promote sentient animal interests. The case proceeds by considering five possible objections to recognising animals in these guidelines: 1) Animals and their interests are not significantly affected by AI; 2) Humans lack duties to protect or help animals; 3) Considering animals is overridden by more pressing duties to humans; 4) There is too much disagreement about how animals should be treated; 5) AI ethics guidelines are unhelpful or counterproductive. These objections, the paper argues, ultimately fail. A very important reason for being more inclusive of animals, it claims, is their ongoing moral and social invisibility. Paying more attention to sentient animals as morally significant interest-holders in the rapidly evolving AI ethics discourse would go one step towards redressing this problem of marginalisation. Finally, this paper makes broad suggestions for how animals might be appropriately incorporated in ethics guidelines.

With mounting concerns regarding the environmental footprint of AI systems, the number and diversity of actors engaged in evaluating the sustainability of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) more broadly is growing. Based on nine semi-structured interviews with key experts, this paper investigates the dilemmas active participants in this global project face and the strategies they employ to overcome them. Our analysis shows that experts question the extent to which quantification fosters a radical enough version of change. Some evaluators want to make AI systems more “efficient” by reducing the amount of resources needed to develop AI models and infrastructures. Others critique this approach for failing to limit overall carbon emissions. Instead they insist on making AI “frugal”, an approach which expands the range of actions to mitigate AI’s indirect environmental impacts and includes consideration of whether AI is needed at all in each specific context. This tension creates situations of emotional discomfort and divided loyalties at two key moments: access to funding and expertise. In some cases, it leads some contributors to build coalitions of workers inside and across companies in order to challenge management, or to leave their organizations altogether.

In this paper, we critique a pervasive discourse about the environmental implications of artificial intelligence as witnessed in news media, public policy analysis and computer science literature. In this discourse, AI is seen through a paradoxical lens: as essential to reducing the damaging effects of the climate crisis and, at the same time, a looming threat to both the climate and broader ecological crises. This seemingly contradictory framing of AI as both ‘remedy’ and ‘poison’ resonates with the concept of pharmakon, a heuristic device used extensively in the philosophy of technology. In this paper we show how the policy discourses of leading actors such as the OECD, Green Software Foundation and Microsoft's data scientists resolve the pharmacological nature of AI's environmental impact by narrowing the scope of its toxic properties and hence the solutions required to enable the technology's continued use and expansion. We argue that these discourses are reducing and oversimplifying the problem at stake to a simple proposition: we need more AI for climate tech applications but less energy thirsty AI. We show how this framing of the problem arose from a particular recent political history of the ‘techlash’, which in turn prompted considerable efforts to quantify AI's carbon footprint. We suggest a different problematisation inspired by science and technology studies scholar Andrew Barry's methodological approach, one that can re-open the problem-space of AI's environmental impact. This approach is sketched through four methodological starting points: unpacking the material entanglements between AI and ecologies; being sensible to geohistory – the specific locally situated nature of data centres and energy grids sustaining AI training, tuning and deployment; envisioning the multiplicity of solutions to the climate crisis (beyond carbon accounting of the AI footprint); and finally, rereading AI (by acknowledging the heterogeneity of actors and interests along AI supply chains).

Issues with current food systems have been problematised through various lenses, including concerns about the dominance of intensively produced animal-source foods (ASFs) or ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in diets on health, environmental sustainability and/or justice grounds. In this commentary, we argue that there is value in adopting a more common framing and approach for these food systems issues based on the understanding that ASFs and UPFs are interlinked manifestations of financialised food systems prioritising the interests of a select few large corporations and their shareholders. Firstly, we outline some of the common drivers of the proliferation of UPFs and ASFs in current food systems, including a regulatory environment that prioritises the interests of large corporations and financiers above other considerations. Based on ecological regulation theory, we then propose multi-sectoral policy options and collective actions to improve both human and planetary health. These include (but are not limited to): re-orienting agricultural subsidies toward more agroecological operations; prioritising equity-focused measures, such as a universal basic income; land use value taxes; and revitalising competition policy to address agri-food industry consolidation. Implementing the proposed actions will likely require strong coordination and advocacy from various civil society groups. We suggest that a framing centred on financialised food systems may create space for allies to mobilise and effectively draw on collective resources, including public health, food sovereignty alliances, labour unions, farmers, small-scale agri-food businesses and retailers, consumer groups, animal welfare groups, governments without vested interests, and intergovernmental organisations.

The World Health Organization and public health experts are calling for urgent restrictions on the online marketing of unhealthy food. The harmful effects of exposure to advertising for ‘unhealthy foods’, including discretionary foods high in fat, salt or sugar, particularly for children, has prompted a proposed policy action in Australia to prohibit all online unhealthy food marketing. We used a novel data donation infrastructure, the Australian Ad Observatory, to create a dataset of 1703 ads promoting top-selling unhealthy food brands that had been placed by 141 different advertisers on 367 individual Australians’ Facebook feeds. We used this dataset to identify any targeting of unhealthy food ads towards young people (18–24), investigate harmful marketing practices by four of the top advertisers (KFC, McDonald’s, Cadbury and 7-Eleven); and demonstrate how online advertising may be made observable and accountable. We find indications that young people (18–24), especially young men, are being targeted by unhealthy food, especially fast food, ads. We also find that unhealthy food brands use potentially harmful marketing strategies to appeal to children, young people, parents and the broader community, including cartoon characters, and associations with popular sports and greenwashing. The policy implications of our findings are that a broad prohibition on all forms of unhealthy food advertising online is desirable to protect not only children but also young people and the broader community. Such a prohibition will go one step towards addressing the commercial and digital determinants of health caused by harmful industries’ use of online automated advertising.

Growing evidence suggests that diets high in ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are harming human and planetary health. UPFs therefore pose a complex regulatory challenge, yet, to date, little research has systematically assessed how governments have responded to UPFs in national food policies. Here we analyse data from the NOURISHING database to assess the scope and strength of UPF-related regulatory interventions worldwide, using three frameworks—namely, NOURISHING, the Nuffield Ladder and the Modalities of Control framework. Of the 417 UPF-related measures identified, most imply food processing or mention UPF examples rather than refer to processing or UPFs specifically. The scope of action is narrow; 85.9% of interventions change the food environment, largely represented by nutrition labelling. The strength of action is limited; interventions are skewed towards informational measures to influence consumer choice, and 47.1% of measures use consensus to shape food business conduct. These findings highlight an opportunity to broaden the scope and strength of UPF-related regulation.

The Codex Alimentarius Commission (Codex) has a substantial influence over the structure and operation of food systems by setting international standards that affect the composition, structure and labelling of food. Despite the dual mandates of Codex to protect public health and ensure fair practices in food trade, food systems are increasingly unhealthy and unsustainable. An ecological reorientation of the decision-making elements that influence how Codex sets food standards—particularly mandates, governance and risk assessment—could help transform food systems towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals.