Ned O'Sullivan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair for arranging such a very interesting meeting. It is very educational to me. I was not in the room for the start of it but I listened to every bit of it. I want to compliment our witnesses on the comprehensive reports they have given and how they have intertwined with and complemented each other. It has been a very useful and fulfilling meeting from my point of view anyway because I have a lot to learn. At my age, having been finally able to conquer the Internet and the world wide web and figure out, with the help of my grandchildren, how to work my iPhone, now I am confronted with this whole new dystopian future of AI, and all the kind of terrors that are implicated in it. Even though I understand that there are positive and negative elements to it, I would be like the general public. I would say most of the general public has a fear of AI and sees it a something sinister that is going to change their lives not for the better but for the worse.

I have some personal experience of dealing with that kind of "deep fake" stuff. I am an addict and in long-term recovery, thank God, and I do a lot of work with young addicts. I have seen the harmful influence of AI and these weird platforms on young people who are struggling with early recovery.

If the young people are lucky enough to join organisations such as AA or Gamblers Anonymous they will get help there and someone to talk to but very often they do not and have recourse to their laptops or their iPhones in the dead of night on their own and encounter all of these weird suggestions and encouragement to go a certain route. A lot of it is for a profit motive. They want to sell people a therapy package but an awful lot of the time it goes very queer. I am aware of a number of suicides that were at least partly caused and encouraged by insidious social media AI.

I have a question but I just want to say that I was very interested in Dr. Ryan's comments. He gave me focus for the first time ever on the whole profit motive underlying an awful lot of this business. Obviously, someone is making a packet out of it and money has no morals. It strikes me that it should not be beyond the global body politic to find some way of hurting these companies. The only way we can hurt people who are in it for profit is to reduce their profits and take money from them in one way or another whether it is by sanctions or some form of indirect taxation such as levying huge costs on advertisers. Very often people will not get a conscience until they have to pay for it. That is my own view.

My question is around what can we do as public representatives, as members of this committee, as an Oireachtas and as a Government. What should we be doing that we are not doing? A meeting such as this will help raise awareness. A lot of people are watching this. I know that and I have gotten feedback on it.