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Standards for a Responsible AI Future: Reflections on the Seoul Statement

The statement comes at a time when principles of justice, dignity, and human rights are increasingly politicized, questioned, or treated as negotiable. 

Standards for a Responsible AI Future: Reflections on the Seoul Statement
Photo by Nicole Avagliano / Unsplash

By Jacobo Castellanos, Coordinator of the Technology, Threats, and Opportunities team at WITNESS

On December 2, the ITU, ISO and IEC issued their Seoul Statement: a vision for AI standards that account for global contexts, rights impacts, and real-world harms.

The Seoul Statement includes four core commitments:

  • Integrating socio-technical perspectives into standards: ensuring AI standards address not just algorithms and data, but real-world impacts on people, societies, and the environment.
  • Embedding human rights and universal values: protecting dignity, privacy, fairness, and non-discrimination throughout AI design and governance.
  • Building an inclusive, multi-stakeholder community: enabling governments, industry, researchers, and civil society to shape global AI norms together.
  • Strengthening public–private collaboration and capacity-building: reducing global inequalities so all countries and communities can meaningfully benefit from AI.

This vision is not only welcome; it is a meaningful signal of hope. 

It comes at a time when principles of justice, dignity, and human rights—once a shared reference point for international cooperation and for civil society’s engagement with governments and companies—are increasingly politicized, questioned, or treated as negotiable. 

Why this matters

Standards, like regulation, form the structural base of the AI stack. By committing to explicitly consider human rights and real-world impact into standards development, the ITU, ISO, and IEC can help effectively steer AI’s impact toward protecting human rights, strengthening the information ecosystem, and fostering responsible innovation.

Human rights and civil society groups have been calling for this shift for years (see for example OHCHR’s latest report). Standards alone won’t solve every AI concern, but they can create a pathway, together with regulation and tooling, that will lead towards rights protections and limiting misuse. At WITNESS, we work at the intersection of technology and human rights, and we have seen this firsthand in our work with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), where a harm assessment continues to shape both the design of the standard and the ecosystem around it. By developing Content Credentials, a form of tamper-evident metadata that travels with an image, video, or audio file to show when, where, and how it was created or modified, C2PA offers a practical example of how standards can embed rights considerations from the ground up.

From Promise to Practice 

While this vision is promising, a pressing question remains: How will these commitments be translated into action? 

The Seoul Statement was presented during a two-day summit held in Seoul, but concrete plans for its implementation were not shared. Representatives from the ITU, ISO, and IEC did not publicly outline how this vision would be realized, and no details were provided regarding budgets, mechanisms, timelines, or accountability measures.

Standards work is inherently slow and resource-intensive. Incorporating socio-technical and human rights considerations adds another layer of complexity that requires significant investment in expertise, time and financial support. Without such investment, the Seoul Statement risks becoming a symbolic gesture rather than a meaningful turning point.

A notable concern was the limited presence of civil society at the Seoul summit. Multistakeholder participation was frequently mentioned, yet only a few human rights groups attended. Government and industry voices were far more visible, which is too narrow a basis for defining future AI norms. For the SDOs’ vision to carry real weight, civil society must be involved consistently, adequately resourced, and included from the beginning, not added in as an afterthought.

A Call to Stay Engaged

Still, there is reason for cautious optimism. The Seoul Statement represents an important first step, formally issued by institutions that will play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. By acknowledging that AI standards cannot be “just technical” and must be grounded in human rights and societal wellbeing, it creates a platform to push for meaningful change.

At WITNESS, we will continue to be actively involved in the C2PA, where we co-chair its Threats and Harms Task Force, and we will engage with the World Standards Cooperation’s AI and Multimedia Authenticity Standards Collaboration (ITU, IEC and ISO) as it positions AI standards as a powerful tool for regulation development and enforcement. 

We call on civil society, researchers, regulators and funders to remain engaged, not only when milestones are announced, but through the long, technical, often opaque process of drafting, reviewing and implementing standards. We must also hold the ITU, ISO, and IEC accountable to their own vision, while working to extend this commitment to other national and international SDOs, and to the remaining building blocks that sit atop the foundations of regulation and standards in the AI ecosystem. 

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