<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/06/ai-environmental-assessments-robodebt-style-failures>
"Conservationists and scientists have warned a mining lobby proposal to use
artificial intelligence to speed up national environmental approvals could
generate “robodebt-style” failures, putting threatened species at further risk.
The Minerals Council of Australia has asked the government to spend $13m to
trial the use of AI to help companies prepare applications and help the federal
government make decisions.
But the Biodiversity Council, a group of independent experts across 11
universities, told
Guardian Australia while AI could play a role in simple
tasks, automating environment assessments “could lead to robodebt-style
failure, where computers make flawed decisions without transparency” that could
ultimately push species closer to extinction.
Robodebt refers to the automated debt-recovery scheme which, between 2015 and
2019, wrongly accused hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients of
overpayments.
Lis Ashby, the Biodiversity Council’s lead on policy and innovation, said
Australia’s cornerstone environment law – the
Environment Protection and
Biodiversity Conservation Act – was “full of vague language and broad
ministerial discretion”.
“The vague rules add to the current length of assessment processes, because
they impede rules-based decision-making by human assessors. The lack of clear
rules will be even more problematic for an AI tool,” she said.
“Setting clear rules in the
National Environmental Standards, including
defining what is unacceptable, would speed up assessment times, even without AI
help, and is important for any future adoption of AI.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
