Citizen Writes
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence and public life
05/10/2026
The rise of Artificial Intelligence will reach into every corner of public life, impacting billions of people. To find out more, we spoke with Professor Athina Karatzogianni, Professor of Technology and Society in the University’s School of Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy, who explained some of the key areas where AI will affect all our lives.
“The current discussion has to do with guardrails, in terms of the frontier models,” explains Professor Karatzogianni. “So: what are the safety benchmarks that must be followed before AI deployment? We need guardrails against biological threats, cyber-attacks, scams, geopolitical issues, the use of AIs in war. And also guardrails against algorithmic bias and discrimination in a judicial context, in policing, in security, in credit, in hiring people, in employment.
“Another area of concern has to do with privacy, data governance and intellectual property. What are the boundaries in terms of data scraping, consent, alignments with GDPR, royalties to creators – even the ownership of synthetic outputs. So many questions surrounding that!”
Global expansion of AI will have environmental impact, says Professor Karatzogianni, not least through the infrastructure of the massive data centres driving it. “Think about the energy grid demands of AI data centres. How sustainable is this in terms of the environment versus the industrial goals that the AI tech giants have?”
Then there are the implications for (inter)national security: “In terms of ethical guidelines and international treaties, how do you deal with autonomous defence capabilities? With the use of AI with lethal autonomous weapon systems and military AI integration? Then you have the problem of information warfare and deepfakes in terms of disinformation. What are the strategies at the state level? What are the counter-disinformation agencies and regulatory frameworks needed to combat election interference and AI synthetic media attacks?”
On top of all this is the use and impact of AI in government and public services. “This is quite important because you have the deployment of AI for processing welfare benefits and tax audit in immigration cases, and so on. Big fails in this area could impact the lives of thousands, even millions of people. In response, what kind of rules do we need to set about how public organisations and public agencies buy and use AI software, in terms of transparency and auditability? Ultimately at what level do you have to fall back to human operators instead of using AI? I would say that these are some of the broad areas where we see problems emerging that we have to deal with.”
Beyond the practicalities of local and national government, Professor Karatzogianni says that AI has implications for democracy itself: “Contemporary democratic societies face challenges that are unprecedented due to AI algorithms which affect the media ecosystem and the communication ecosystem, because they redefine democracy and they ask us to rethink how a citizen participates more than ever.
“This needs to be urgently addressed in the face of global digital networks and the ability to commodify data sources. Citizen behaviour is seen as consumers having behaviours and preferences that can be manipulated. Then the interactions of these consumers are harvested and analysed by media platforms and AI systems. As a result, these citizens are not really citizens at all, they become products, targeted by social media platforms.”
All of which raises the question, at a time when trust in both politicians and the media is at an all-time low, of how policy makers might use AI to re-establish and strengthen public trust?
“There is a need to develop and enforce regulatory frameworks across industries and across sectors,” emphasises Professor Karatzogianni. “But these regulatory frameworks alone will not be sufficient. There’s work to be done in terms of critical literacies that need to be cultivated as part of lifelong learning, to enable citizens to interrogate the content, and to be conscious of the social and cultural bias embedded in the algorithms and data that are being produced.
“It’s difficult to be literate in a time of deepfakes and synthetic media. So we have to actually understand – and governments have to understand – what kind of literacies we need when we’re talking about generative AI and deepfakes. This rise of synthetic media raises challenges that governments have to deal with, not as a symptom, but as part of the political education of their citizens, especially young people.”
On the subject of young people, we asked Professor Karatzogianni what AI skills the leaders of the future will need.
“Future leaders will need the ability to navigate the regulatory environment for sure,” she explains, “to ensure responsible AI use that can mitigate biases and discriminatory outcomes, and to bring together expertise from different sectors like academia, industry and government. Because only by doing that can you develop effective AI policies. Media industry workers, independent content creators, and organizations need to shift from ‘attention-economy’ metrics to frameworks that prioritize audience mental health and healthy civic engagement, through slow media movements, algorithmic detoxing, and designing social media environments that foster genuine human connection. We need more research highlighting the realities of labor in the creator economy, focusing on burnout, financial instability, and algorithmic vulnerability, collective bargaining for platform accountability for creator welfare, shifting from transactional commerce to human-first communities, de-centering Western-centric media norms, creating, and investigating how local media can survive in monopolized digital spaces”.
Professor Karatzogianni’s expertise in this field relates to her launching the University of Leicester’s brand new MRes (Masters by Research) in Artificial Intelligence and Public Policy. This postgraduate degree’s first student cohort has started this October.
“This is a distance learning Masters so anyone in the world can take it,” she explains. “It is designed to equip students – or any practitioner or policymaker – with the critical ability to analyse social challenges, predict policy outcomes, and implement AI-driven policy solutions. Because these are more and more required for demanding, professional roles that engage with AI and AI deployment. The MRes provides a comprehensive understanding of AI public policy in areas such as AI governance, strategy, management and ethics, but also it allows students to specialise in different key policy areas, such as health, environment, security, policing, social justice or democratic participation. What we want students to be able to do is systematically use advanced and specialist data to creating policy briefing assessments and similar. We want them to be able to design and produce policy briefs to enhance AI policy and practise in specific policy areas.”
Finally we asked Professor Karatzogianni, as we are asking all our AI experts: if you could give one message to a student considering studying at Leicester because of its leadership in AI, what would it be?
Without hesitation she replies: “I would say that the institution itself has a proven ability to navigate principles of equality, diversity and inclusion, and this is very important in AI policy research. This is not just about AI development that is unchecked, but about concerns around discrimination, biases and inequality, and environmental issues. At Leicester we have fantastic institutes in areas such as environmental futures and digital culture which together create a great research environment for students in the growing field of AI and public policy.”