Pakistani rights activist among others honoured with 'alternative Nobel prize'

STOCKHOLM: A prominent AI researcher, together with a woman lawyer from Pakistan and two women-led rights groups received the Right Livelihood prize on Wednesday, dubbed an "alternative Nobel".

The jury said in a statement it had chosen US artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru "for challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence and pioneering digital technology rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency."

Gebru is known for her work examining how biases influence AI and in 2017, Gebru co-founded Black in AI.

In 2020, she co-authored a pioneering paper on the risks of biases in so called large language models (LLMs) while serving as co-lead of tech giant Google's Ethical AI team.

The company asked her to retract the paper or remove her name and she was then fired after refusing to do so without certain guarantees, according to the jury.

After this she founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), "whose work challenges the concentration of power in the technology sector and exposes the harms AI systems are already causing in people's everyday lives, particularly among communities facing discrimination and exclusion."

The Sweden-based Right Livelihood Foundation also honoured Pakistani human rights lawyer Jalila Haider "for breaking barriers, as the first female lawyer from her Hazara community, to challenge ethnic, state and patriarchal persecution, guided by the conviction that no human being is illegal."

The foundation also gave the nod to the Rural Women's Assembly — a grassroots movement of more than 178,000 small-scale farmers across 11 Southern African nations.

The movement was spotlighted for organising rural women "into a united force defending land, seed and bodily autonomy against corporate and patriarchal dispossession."

The Georgian Young Lawyers' Association (GYLA), which the jury described as "Georgia's oldest and most prominent human rights organisation," was also honoured.

Founded in 1994 by volunteer lawyers, the foundation said it had been recognised "as the moral compass of Georgian society".

The jury said it honoured the group "for building and safeguarding Georgian democracy and sustaining civic power in the face of an autocratic crackdown."

The Right Livelihood award was established in 1980, when Swedish-German stamp collector Jakob von Uexkull sold part of his collection to found it, after the foundation behind the Nobel Prizes refused to create new honours in the fields of environment and international development.