MCF Seminar Series: GenAI and the Risk to Environmental Justice

Tech companies have offered GenAI as a potential silver-bullet to addressing the need to ‘do more with less’. Regulatory responses have concentrated on data rights, IP, biases and threats to human agency. Discussions of ethical and equitable issues arising from GenAI have been framed by these concerns in the present.  

In this seminar, Dr Steve Crawford, a law and humanities scholar influenced by both socio-legal and critical legal studies, argues that equitable down-stream cost considerations should be fundamental to GenAI risk-assessment prior to implementation. There has been consideration of the power usage of GenAI but less so the wider environmental and resource demands. The under explored issues include the tangible environmental and human rights costs incurred by policy and regulatory decisions made in the present that will fall due in the future. 

About Dr Steve Crawford:

Dr Steve Crawford is a law and humanities scholar influenced by both socio-legal and critical legal studies, as well as by previous study of Archaeology. His research is driven by interest in authority and legitimacy as social constructions; including examining why people perceive institutions of governance as legitimate (or not). Related to this he is interested in how groups establish shared practice and behavioural and regulatory norms. He is currently concluding a project critiquing the relationship between GenAI development and environmental justice, and developing a new project titled ‘Ethical and Equitable decision-making in AI enabled environmental research’. He is a Lecturer at Leicester Law School and a member of Leicester’s Institute for Environmental Futures.