The work of algorithmic justice doesn't stay in one room. This quarter, it took us to the Vatican, kept us teaching all summer long, and brought a new advisor into the fold. AJL’s work moved across rooms, platforms, and public spaces where the future of AI is being debated, deployed, and contested.
At the Vatican, we brought the call for algorithmic justice into a global moral conversation about human dignity in the age of AI. Through AJL Summer School, we continued tracing how automated systems already shape everyday life, from healthcare and education to policing and public services. And as we welcome Rebekah Tweed as AJL’s new Senior Advisor, we return to a question that animates so much of this work: what happens when technologies built in the name of safety, efficiency, or progress are deployed without meaningful consent, accountability, or care for the people most likely to be harmed?
Across each of these instances is the same urgent demand: AI must not be allowed to quietly redraw the boundaries of likeness, livelihood, and life itself. The people most affected by these systems must not be pushed outside the frame.
The Algorithmic Justice League at the Vatican
The Algorithmic Justice League was honored to take part in the “Preserving Human Voices and Faces” Conference, held at the Pontifical Urbaniana University on May 21, 2026. There, AJL brought its call for algorithmic justice, biometric rights, creative rights, and the protection of human dignity into one of the most consequential conversations underway about the future of artificial intelligence.
The Conference built upon AJL's earlier engagement with the Vatican, when our founder, Dr. Joy Buolamwini, presented her book, Unmasking AI, to Pope Leo XIV. That exchange advanced a concern at the heart of AJL's mission: as AI systems expand their reach, who is protected, who is exploited, and who is pushed outside the frame? During Panel II, Dr. Joy was joined by Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Full Professor in the Department of Media and Digital Culture at Tecnológico de Monterrey, and Benjamin Rosman, Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics and Director of the MIND Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Together they examined a pressing question: whether AI models are intensifying social inequalities and injustices. The discussion addressed the human stakes of these systems: biased outcomes, digital extraction, synthetic media, AI dependency, and the urgent need to safeguard creative and biometric rights. Throughout, Dr. Joy drew attention to those she calls the excoded: the people harmed, erased, exploited, or excluded by AI systems. For AJL, these harms are not abstract. They take three forms:
Excoding likeness: when faces, voices, bodies, and biometric data are captured, cloned, surveilled, or exploited without meaningful consent.
Excoding livelihood: when artists, writers, workers, and creators have their labor extracted without consent, compensation, control, or credit.
Excoding life itself: when AI is deployed in war, policing, targeting, and automated systems of violence.
On May 22, speakers and guests were received in an audience with Pope Leo XIV ahead of his historic encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas, released days later. AJL's call for biometric rights resonates with the broader moral appeal at the center of that document: to disarm AI wherever it threatens human life and dignity.
The conversation in Rome asked who AI protects and who it leaves outside the frame. Closer to home, we've been answering that question week by week.
All summer, we're touring the places AI has quietly moved into your life, like your doctor's office, your courtroom, your kid's school, your commute, your hiring portal, your apartment application, and your movie theater. We show you what they said AI would do, and what it's actually doing. Just the receipts AJL has been gathering for years, served weekly.
So far we've covered:
Healthcare: Tennessee's TennCare Connect wrongfully cut Medicaid coverage for thousands. Optum's risk algorithm, used across hospitals serving 200 million Americans, systematically steered less care to Black patients. But...a federal court ruled TennCare's system illegal, and researchers who got inside Optum's algorithm cut its bias by 84%.
Policing and Prisons: Facial recognition has driven the wrongful arrest of at least 14 people since 2019, nearly all of them Black. But...Robert Williams sued Detroit PD and won reforms; LAPD shut down its predictive policing program after an audit.
Education: AI proctoring flags neurodivergent and disabled students as “suspicious.” AI grading scored essays from Black and ESL students up to 10% lower than equivalent work. But...the Houston Federation of Teachers won a federal injunction against an opaque evaluation algorithm, and the FTC sued Edmodo for misusing kids' data.
Join us for more Summer School in July! Bring your questions and a friend who keeps saying, “AI is just a tool.”
You think you're heading to a concert. Then you find out you're being surveilled without your knowledge or permission.
Back in 2018, reports surfaced that facial recognition had been used at Taylor Swift concerts to identify potential stalkers. No one wants to be stalked. But the bigger question is one that we continue to confront and is becoming increasingly salient today: what happens to privacy when the public’s biometric data is captured, analyzed, and acted upon without meaningful notice or consent?
That question compelled Rebekah Tweed to embark on the work she does today. We're proud to welcome Rebekahas AJL's new Senior Advisor. A responsible AI strategist, field builder, and public interest technology leader, Rebekah brings deep experience at the intersection of AI governance, institutional accountability, and public engagement. She previously served as Executive Director of All Tech Is Human, where she helped grow a global responsible technology community and led programming on AI governance, workforce development, and public interest tech.
In a new interview with Sarder TV, Rebekah traces her path from the music industry to the front lines of accountable AI, reflecting on how one high-profile use of facial recognition opened up a much larger set of questions about tech, power, and consent, and digging into the thin line between safety, surveillance, and biometric rights.
Her work aligns closely with AJL’s mission: to make visible the people and communities too often rendered invisible by the coded gaze, and to ensure that emerging technologies are governed with justice, accountability, and lived experience at the center.
One fight, many fronts. Whether the room is a Vatican conference, a weekly lesson in your inbox, or a conversation about who gets scanned at a concert door, the question is the same: who does AI protect, and who does it leave outside the frame? AJL exists to make sure that line isn't drawn without us. Thank you for standing in it with us. Read it, share it, and bring someone with you!
The Algorithmic Justice League is an organization that combines research and storytelling to illuminate the social implications and harms of artificial intelligence (AI). We are reducing AI harms in society and increasing the accountability in the use of AI systems.
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