Professor Barry O'Sullivan:

Frankly, it is everybody who is involved in the chain, from the production of it, including the producer, right through to the person who presents it in front of the viewer. Within AI we have to get to the notion of provenance. If information was food we would want to make sure there is traceability right back to where it began. We do not have this with data. Despite the fact that data is, as we have seen, impacting the minds of our children and society more generally there is no sense of traceability. Not only does there need to be traceability there needs to be accountability right along that sort of data chain that brings us right back to the person who has developed the technology that produces it. We do not have that. As we heard earlier, the AI Act has this whole labelling issue where if something is generated by AI, it needs to be labelled as such, but unfortunately the people who create this content are already criminals, so what do they care about the AI Act. They are not going to label anything.

On the question of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act, the commission we have is fantastic and the organisation is fantastic but my only concern about the legislation itself is that we cannot expect those who are harmed to form an orderly line. As we have heard today, the scale and the nature of the harm can be enormous. Literally hundreds of thousands, millions or tens of millions of people could be harmed simultaneously. How do we deliver accountability and redress to people who are harmed by technology on that scale? My concern with the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act - and there are people here who are far more qualified to talk about it - is that it does not quite envisage that scale. Not only does it not quite envisage the scale, we also need to figure out what "harm" means, what kind of harms there are, and what harmful content is. A lot of work needs to be done on establishing what that means. We can identify some extreme forms but there are subtle forms of harm as well, which was part of the response to Senator Mary Seery Kearney's remarks about the outsourcing of self-esteem, which in a sense is a harm. What does "harm" mean? What the people involved are doing is fantastic and I have absolutely no criticism of that whatsoever but I am not sure the legislation is cognisant of the scale and the impact of this technology and what is needed to seek redress.