Mr. Ronan Lupton:

I support and associate myself with Professor O'Hare's final remarks. There are certainly issues. The EU AI Act looks at providers, deployers, distributors, product manufacturers, authorised representatives and affected persons under its scheme. There are six or seven categories. The question was who and what is being regulated. With respect to who is being regulated, four or five from that list ultimately suggest that the regulation should be looking at distributors, deployers, employers and controllers. That is the sort of language that is being used. As to what is being regulated, it is the standards. If we put them in the workplace - to take the topic of this forum as an example - the standards are complex. We got into that a little earlier with Deputies Louise O'Reilly, Stanton and Bruton. We are considering issues that may not be straightforward. Who will disclose their algorithm for the payment of deliveries of takeaway fast food? They will immediately say it is a competitive issue and would breach their IP rights or whatever else, so they will not do so. That does not stop employees, for example, trying to vindicate a right to all the data about them on the employer's system or to state the data are wrong and ask for them to be corrected under the data protection frameworks, if they are able to interact with the AI. There is again a question mark about that. I hope that at least answers the question of who and what is being regulated, but there may be lines of the what and lines of the who in respect of the two strands of the Senator's question. In other words, we might decide to bring in a regulation for employers that deal with employees and technology. There might be three or four Bills under that banner. On the who side, there might be manufacturers, distributors and deployers of the technology. If we wanted to have a wholesale-retail kind of model, people in the wholesale space are doing the development work; people in the retail space are using it and actively have it functioning in their businesses and societies.

The next thing the Senator mentioned was the land registry type system. I will clarify if I may. I picked up from Professor O'Hare's correct submission that developments are ongoing with - I think two companies were mentioned, but there are more - Adobe and Microsoft where they are using a flagging mechanism to watermark, to use that expression, images to confirm the bona fides of those images. That is really what I was talking about, rather than having a land registry for all AI activity. That would be oppressive. However, for example, when there is a concern about the genesis of a particular image, if someone says it comes from RTÉ news and it has been watermarked in the right-hand corner, people can have some confidence - unless that has been faked - that the image is correct. This is the challenge. Ultimately, there are systems faking things that appear to be correct. Again, to use my example of celebrities selling Bitcoin and Rolex watches and so forth, we have seen that it is occurring. However, that is more criminal activity than automated computer generated activity, although I might be wrong about that. To clarify the point, I was not suggesting that everything should go into a big land registry-type database. However, the European institutions might decide that certain grades, such as high-end bigger monopolistic players of AI manufacturing and deployment technology might have some form of registry set-up to be able to say they record in a certain way and behave ethically as a result. However, if we look at the AI Act recitals, we see that the EU will be slow to oppressively regulate in that space. It will say it would be a limitation to innovation to go too hard on the regulation of that. There is a middle ground.

I will go back to Professor O'Hare's point about whether we should be doing things nationally. The answer is "Yes". However, if we go too far, it will make us unattractive and if we do not do enough, we will be a laughing stock for not doing anything. As I said to the Chair at the beginning of the meeting, today's topic is interesting. Usually people come to these committees with a written submission based on draft legislation. Today is more of a general discussion pre-legislation and that is interesting because there is such a wide debate on a wide spectrum of issues, some of which are beneficial. There is no doubt about the benefits AI can bring to certain sectors, but the problem is the downside to society. In the workplace, to some extent if a union is operating, the employees and members of the unions will be protected because they have collective bargaining power. One useful and interesting example was the change of ownership of Twitter recently. At the weekend, media were discussing changes to employment legislation as a result of what was seen as behaviour whereby the company did not consult the State properly. These are issues in which we were able to move quickly when we wanted to. We must focus on where the environment is going and try to get there before things change too dramatically.