Artificial Intelligence and environmental racism: initial reflections 186 2). It can be broadly defined as systems capable of analyzing a massive volume of information and providing answers to incomplete scenarios (Bathaee, 2018, p. 898) in a way that mimics human behavior. However, technology is not neutral and encompasses not only developers’ bias but also society’s bias contained in the vast amount of data used to train it. This means, and studies have shown (Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018) that the uses of those technologies have a differential impact on historically marginalized populations. Furthermore, the development and use of AI itself impact the environment, but this impact is not equally distributed among humans. Environmental racism relates “to the unequal access to a clean environment and basic environmental resources based on race” (Patnaik et al., 2020). Environmental negative impacts such as hazardous waste sites and flood-prone residential areas disproportionately burden low-income neighborhoods with increased percentages of racial and ethnic minorities. Furthermore, the cascading effects of climate change, including fatalities and injuries resulting from floods, heatwaves, and compromised food quality due to pests, disproportionately impact traditionally marginalized populations. This chapter focuses through human rights lenses on the question of how AI relates to environmental racism through three aspects: carbon footprint, discriminatory content on large language models, and data-driven AI climate initiatives. Those aspects were chosen through the bibliographic review, but other areas need to be explored by further research. The hypothesis is that AI’s relation to environmental racism is ambiguous: it can both enhance environmental racismand also be a tool to prevent it. Therefore, human rights play an essential role in developing safeguards in its development and use to prevent AI from enhancing environmental racism. The chapter aims to raise awareness of some of the impacts of AI on environmental racism and on some possible human rightsbased safeguards to foster positive impact. Regarding the methodology, the chapter is based on a human rights-based approach3. To address the research question, qualita3 (United Nations Sustainable Development Group, n.d.) “The human rightsbased approach (HRBA) is a conceptual framework for the process of human development that is normatively based on international human rights standards and operationally directed to promoting and protecting human rights. It
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