Fighting ground-level AI harms

Fears about artificial intelligence aren’t just for a grim, imagined future. AI hurts people right now in many unfair ways with few chances to hold anyone accountable. Government officials, business leaders, and other people in positions of power regularly use AI and related technologies to wrongly cut Medicaid and other public benefits, deny people housing, employment, or credit, take kids from loving parents, intensify domestic violence and sexual abuse or harassment, label and mistreat middle- and high-school kids as likely dropouts or criminals, and falsely accuse Black and brown people of crimes, all at scales and speeds impossible with analog methods.

Where do low-income people turn if they can’t pay a lawyer? A local legal aid office—they provide free legal representation in every U.S. county —might take the case. But, AI raises so many new and complicated issues that it’s hard to fight successfully without cutting-edge expertise and specialized resources.

TechTonic Justice will resist the harms that AI inflicts on low-income people nationwide by supporting, coalescing, and catalyzing legal aid programs, their client communities, and other frontline organizations. Having defeated an algorithm that Arkansas used to cut Medicaid home-care benefits, founder Kevin De Liban has pioneered successful multi-dimensional advocacy strategies that win against unjust AI by blending litigation, community activation, public education, and media. Using this battle-tested model, TechTonic Justice will harness the strength of people on the ground to oppose unjust AI and those who insist on using it even where the harms are clear.

The front lines in today’s struggle for a better world shape the fault lines of the future. Current efforts are too slow for the urgency of this moment. We need seismic shifts. We need TechTonic Justice.

Contact: Kevin De Liban, kdeliban@techtonicjustice.com