Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent)

I am interested to see the environmental piece coming up in a couple of presentations, and that the recommender piece is very strong. I have questions about the gathering of data. Mr. Byrne mentioned the idea of his data being sold. Would he agree that it should not be the case that information can be sold to advertise or target information at someone because they are a teenage boy, teenage girl or anything like that, or because of data that is inferred and gathered about them? This was in the Data Protection Act 2018. The section around the idea of profiling and microtargeting being an offence for commercial purposes when a child is involved was never commenced. Mr. Byrne mentioned the idea of bias loop. It is getting deeper and deeper. I ask him to comment on the idea of the prejudices arising from what is getting trained on. We do not just need to regulate who can be accessed by the algorithms, but how the algorithms are being trained, particularly when we have seen very active positions being taken by some of the owners of major tech companies. They have been clear about their intentions to train and that their AI products should represent and perhaps, in some cases, push certain prejudices and perspectives.

I would be interested in that. I then have a specific one for Mr. Joyce, and Mr. Byrne might comment on it as well, regarding the idea of prejudice being pressed. The witnesses also mentioned deepfakes. We have talked about deepfakes for individuals but it almost strikes me just hearing the witnesses speak that there is something around deepfakes for communities. That is, if you have the pretend Traveller or the caricatured or invented LGBT character or anything else that is being created which damages the community, do we need to look a little bit at the deepfake piece?

Lastly, to Ms Keane, on the relationship piece I was really struck by her mentioning romantic relationships. It is not just the fake empathy piece but the danger of fake relationships in terms of not just the social but also the romantic. We know for example, some of the fake online girlfriends being offered at present are available to 12-year-olds. The witnesses - any of the others or Mr. Byrne - might comment on the danger of those same prejudices, how we react and what romantic relationships should look like when we know there is a lot of misogyny. Is there a danger there in how we set young people up to have romantic relationships in the future if they get used to fake chatbots?