From Voluntary ESG to Legal Duty Corporate Accountability for Access to AI Training Data under the Right to Knowledge Tahera Nasrin

From Voluntary ESG to Legal Duty: Corporate Accountability for Access to AI Training Data under the Right to Knowledge

ABSTRACT

The rapid advancement and widespread integration of artificial intelligence (AI) systems are raising critical concerns about trust and accountability. The integration of AI systems into corporate decision making has become a significant challenge to established notions of legal accountability. Corporate governance traditionally relies on fiduciary duties of care, loyalty, and diligence, premised on accountable human decision-making. However, the growing reliance on opaque, “black box” AI systems disrupt this framework, as directors may defer to algorithmic outputs and evade liability. This creates a gap in legal accountability, leaving affected individuals without effective remedies and undermining the core principles of corporate responsibility.

Although ESG has been promoted as a tool to encourage responsible corporate conduct, its largely voluntary nature limits its effectiveness in addressing such challenges. Concurrently, India has strengthened ESG disclosure requirements through SEBI’s introduction of the the business responsibility and sustainability reporting (BRSR) framework, mandating the top 1,000 listed companies to report standardized ESG metrics by 2021, reflecting a parallel commitment to digital transformation and sustainable growth.

This paper explores the feasibility of addressing the paradox between the dominance of corporations in setting the conditions of AI data training and the right to information enshrined in different international conventions such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The present paper argues that the existing framework of ESG fails to incorporate any measures to enforce responsibility on corporations in regard to their impact on the international information ecosystem which results in an imbalance in the information landscape where only a few players set the rules of knowledge creation and sharing.

Keywords - Artificial intelligence, ESG Performance, Accountability, Transparency, Misinformation, Regulation, Global governance