ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE NOW permeates daily life From the smartphone assistants many of us carry to credit scoring, healthcare imaging, and government services, technological high-end systems (pro-AI-driven) are becoming progressively foundational, invisible, and everywhere in our institutions and economy.
AI is set to be deployed not just in consumer chatbots but in serious public services, such as predictive crop insurance models for farmers, citywide surveillance networks, service-enabled welfare delivery, and voice-based legal assistance in local languages. This technological ubiquity tends to inspire both wonder and anxiety. Yet many users and policymakers instinctively frame AI as a tool or assistant – a way to augment human capabilities – rather than as a competitor or replacement.
We seek the benefit of AI’s speed or pattern-recognition while expecting humans to remain in the loop. This view – that AI should help us rather than supplant us – is a useful starting point when thinking about its impact. It suggests that as we build laws and policies, we treat AI as an enabler of human goals, not a separate “being” with rights.
Even so, we must confront a knotty question: what are “digital rights” in an age of AI? The term appears increasingly in policy debates, but its definition is not self-evident. At a minimum, it implies that citizens retain rights and protections in the digital realm – over their data, their devices, their online speech, and access. AI governance sits atop a vast array of “digital” issues: not just data privacy and security, but digital property, service rights, contract rights, infrastructure access, and more. In practice, “digital rights” often parallel our traditional civil liberties (privacy, expression, equality, etc.) but take on a new shape when technology is involved.
India’s Supreme Court, for instance, has treated privacy as a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, and that has become the constitutional grounding for digital protections in privacy cases. We may even codify rights like data protection or internet access into constitutions for permanence. But, before debating AI ethics or rulemaking, we shall clarify what rights we mean. Should a “right to algorithmic fairness” be elevated to the same level as speech or equality? Do we expect new rights beyond the existing roster of liberties, or are our current rights simply being translated into code?
