Dr. Patricia Scanlon:

I will take that first point. We have had social media for a very long time and the recommender systems have always been AI. It is not bolted on. Actually, they are just getting better. We failed miserably to regulate social media even when we had the evidence of what it was doing to our teenagers, what it was doing to girls. The research came out. We failed at every turn to do any regulation around that. It would take a lot of political will to regulate that. I agree 100% it should be regulated. It is not impossible to do that, technically. A lot of the time, what comes to the top of a recommender system is what gets more clicks. What has happened is there has been a commercial drive to get more attention on social media. AI is making that better and better. I have teenagers and it is something that concerns me. However, we have done nothing on this to date. The EU AI Act actually does not sufficiently cover the fact that these recommender systems are actually informing what you see, so when you open your news feed or your Facebook or LinkedIn, AI decides what you see. I think many people really struggle with that. They think when they open YouTube, they see what I see. That is not true. What you see depends on what you clicked on previously and what information it has about you. That has led to a very polarised world, let alone what it is doing to our teenagers mental-health wise.

I advocate for a lot more regulation when it comes to this because I know those algorithms could be better delivered, tweaked and not ranked solely on engagement and essentially rage baiting. That could be done but it takes a lot of political will to do it and we failed miserably. My hope is that we can get this right with the EU AI Act in some respects. There has been a lot of pushback on that because of this innovation versus regulation and our competitiveness. This is what I struggle with daily. We still have to be able to pay people and cover our costs. What do we do? That is why I said that about not ranking it because there are so many risks to our society and to vulnerable people if we can no longer bring in FDI and if we cannot have our own indigenous companies be sufficiently competitive globally. Let us say we shy away from AI because of that and then our neighbours in the UK, Europe or the US do a better job and deliver services cheaper, faster, better, what does that do to us as a society when we can no longer pay for the things we need?

That is why I said the statement about ranking. I know it is a controversial thing to say and people obviously are reacting to it and fair enough, it was a provocative statement. However, it was for good reason, because it is not easy and it is very complex.