Artificial Intelligence for People

At the occasion of the AI Action Summit hosted by France on 10-11 February 2025, we are partnering with the Australian-French Association for Research and Innovation (AFRAN) to offer a unique Australian-French perspective on some of the main themes discussed at the Summit:

• How to leverage AI in the public sector and at the service of the common good?
• How to anticipate the impact of AI on current and future job markets?
• How to better support the innovation and creative industries ecosystems?

This report was guided by one central question: “What does a society look like when AI is working well and in people’s interest?”#

The report offers readers an overview of some of the work and reflection around AI, produced by the extended Australian-French research and innovation community, based in the South Pacific.

Download Report

We summarise below the main recommendations to emerge from this report.

For AI to work in the public interest, we recommend:

• Greater interdisciplinarity to address challenges raised by AI applications.
• Greater diversity in the people that develop AI solutions, and in the data being used to train AI models.
• AI application to be driven by actual needs rather than ‘technosolutionism’.
• In the Australian and Pacific context, greater involvement of Indigenous communities and design of AI systems that is respectful of the Indigenous cultures.
• The centring of environmental concerns in the development of AI systems.

To anticipate AI’s impact on the workforce, we recommend:

• To conduct evidence-informed research on AI adoption, to better understand AI’s uptake in the workplace.
• To conduct a workers’ survey to better understand their use of the technology and the impact on their working conditions.
• To raise workers’ AI literacy, technical and social understanding.

For responsible innovation, we recommend:

• The use of new tools and frameworks to incorporate more proactive approaches to responsible practices into the development of AI systems.

For equitable AI innovation in the creative industries, we recommend:

• Creating an accessible and decentralised data marketplace where cultural institutions, artists, and content creators can license their works for AI training.
• Establishing AI innovation commons to ensure that the benefits and advances in AI development are distributed across borders.

Our motto is ‘AI for people, not on people’

We would like to thank for their substantive contributions:

• Dr Daniel Binns, Senior Lecturer, Media, RMIT University
• Lorenn Ruster, PhD Candidate, ANU School of Cybernetics
• Dr Emmanuelle Walkowiak, Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in Economics, RMIT

To learn more about this project, contact Sarah Vallee, Secondee at the ANU School of Cybernetics and AFRAN AI Community Lead.