Ms Jean Carberry:

Give me a thousand people and I can move a bit faster. We are working with the EU on the regulation. The Deputy knows it takes a period of time. We want considered regulation. The risk-based approach the EU has taken is a good one. It has looked at what are high-risk uses of AI and that is where the attention is being focused to protect citizens. It is a very measured Act and is a good one. It will be revisited as the technology changes. What we are looking to do is to locate in a body, which I cannot say the name of yet because it has not all been agreed, and make that body a nexus of expertise where we will allow it or give it the resources to hire a number of highly skilled people. The Artificial Intelligence Act is a market supervisory model so different regulators will be responsible in different spheres. If it is AI used by the airline industry, it will be the airline regulator. If it is general products, it will be the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, but they will all be allowed to come into this bank of expertise which we will put in one body.

The EU has an AI office which has been staffed up very quickly and is a resource of expertise for us. I will be on the EU AI board together with my colleague Eamonn Cahill, so we will be sharing experiences with other EU states. We are dancing as fast as we can and what we have is good. The technology is moving fast but we are moving as fast as we can too, and focusing on the youth is a good way to do this because we are not actually getting into the black boxes, so to speak. The Digital Services Act looks at the systems in place in the platform companies and gives us a tool to regulate them if we feel their systems are not up to scratch. Our digital services co-ordinator is doing a very good job on building his team in Coimisiún na Meán and is active in that space too.