Professor Deirdre Ahern:

The Deputy is right; it was out of the tracks really early. In fact, it was November 2022 when generative AI first came around and there was intense lobbying at that point to include it.

The final law was then adopted in 2024. The big thing I am thinking about since then, and it is a topic that many artists, authors and so on are thinking about, is the need to review copyright laws. It is being considered in Ireland but it is probably a bigger issue that our law comes from the EU - the EU copyright directive. There seems to be some indication of a willingness to look at that to make sure that creators are thought about in an equitable way with regard to how their outputs are being used to train large models. There are complex issues here. When the copyright directive was adopted in 2019, there was not the same awareness of the AI impact. That is one area that is ripe for discussion. In fact, a review of that directive is due in June next year. I would like to see that looked at, and we have raised a number of issues in relation to that in one of our papers.