Professor Barry O'Sullivan:

We have regulatory instruments in Europe. We have GDPR, the AI Act and the Digital Services Act. There are also many other regulations relevant to AI. AI was not unregulated before GDPR. We have the instruments and we need enforcement; Deputy Costello is absolutely right. We do not do a good job on enforcement. We spoke about the digital age of consent earlier. We do not enforce it enough. Nothing has changed sufficiently.

With regard to how we put some teeth into enforcement regarding companies that deliver content that is harmful to society, we need to think about some sort of charge of a crime against society. This becomes difficult to define. People who create content that is harmful should be accountable for it. Organisations that disseminate it should be accountable. Nobody is really looking at this. Another aspect we should consider is value alignment. Immediate work we could do on societal harm is to look at how we ensure the business models and processes of these large companies are aligned with the values of society. How do we define this? Unless we can define what the values are, the regulation that would characterise people as being in violation of them and having committed a crime is secondary. Work can be done on this and we could do it in the context of elections or young people. We have heard about a lot of fantastic research that has been done. We can point to examples where harm is being done and we can think about what we want to do about it. There are ways of doing it.