Professor Barry O'Sullivan:

I thank the Senator. On the public's fearful perception of AI, I agree that unfortunately there is a fear out there but it would be a pity to let that go unchallenged because everybody here uses AI every day. In fact, we have Ms Cooney on an MS Teams link right now and the reason we can see her so well is because any delays in the connection are being compensated for using AI. We can hear and see her perfectly because of AI. Our email is not overwhelmed by spam because of AI. Cars are safer because of AI. Everybody uses maybe ten or 15 AI systems every single day and it is a power for good. Of course, there are downsides and we need to focus on those but we should not let the world think that the technology is bad.

The Senator raised a very interesting question about the business models. I said earlier that one of the big challenges we face around the misalignment between what we think these companies should be doing and what they do is that there is a value alignment problem. Our societal values and their value mechanisms are not aligned. They are basically selling access to content for profit and, unfortunately, human beings love to engage in a particular kind of content and may be being mischievous about the production of certain kinds of context. I know I am understating certain contexts but there is a value alignment issue that needs to be addressed. There is no regulatory structure in the world, as far as I am aware, that calls companies to task on questions of value alignment. Until that happens we cannot create this notion of a harm against society which organisations could perpetrate or even individuals could perpetrate by creating fake information. We will see lots of this fake information this year as the world goes to vote. There will be a lot of that.

The last thing I want to comment on is the Senator's remark about the vast sums of money these companies make. It is interesting that the raw material they use for making these vast profits comes from us and, guess what, we give it to them for free. It always strikes me as astonishing that these companies make absolutely eye-watering profits from the data you and I post, the emails we have in our inboxes or the things we interact with online but we get no benefit from that. Maybe, to some extent there is a harm created by it. I will not go on that tangent because we do not have time but there is a question about whether there should actually be some transactional benefit associated with providing information to these companies for them to make a profit. It is a really interesting question; even raising it and having an international forum on whether there should be, I do not want to say a tax, but some sort of contribution to the contributor, to the producer of the raw material - you and me - is interesting. There is the question of whether we should get some of the upside here but we do not, unfortunately.