Dr. Eileen Culloty:

The Deputy's first point was about issue awareness. As I mentioned in the opening statement, we know that people are far more vulnerable or susceptible to disinformation when they lack objective knowledge about a topic. Therefore, the less someone knows, the more likely they are to believe false claims or rumours about it. It is not that controversial to say that in Ireland as a whole, through our media system we tend not to get an enormous amount of coverage or pay much attention to international events or events in Europe. That creates a gap where it can be quite easy to put forward claims about what is happening in Europe or what other countries are doing and people do not necessarily have the knowledge to counteract it. As a small island on the west of Europe, it also creates a psychological distance which we need to overcome to make it clear to people that these are issues.

The Deputy said that disinformation is not a new problem and of course it is not. Warfare has always been a battlefield for controlling how people understand and perceive what is going on. What is completely different are the speed, scale, technology and the capacity to generate. The Deputy spoke about dropping leaflets from the sky. Those doing so needed to own planes to be able to do that. Nowadays people do not need much skill or capability at all, which is quite shocking. Enormous attention has been given to things like ChatGPT. It is quite shocking how powerful that could be to generate vast amounts of content.

Sticking with the war metaphor, we are very much in an arms race with these technologies. For example, The Irish Timeshoax at the weekend happened because the image was not up to scratch. I saw that image and did not take any notice of it. People who do that for a living very quickly saw there was something wrong with that. We cannot expect that those images will continue to be of poor quality; they will get better. The same applies with things created by ChatGPT. It is obvious at the moment, but it will get much better. Even things like bots or trying to detect them, they are usually just based on the fact that the technology is not great yet but we know that it will get better. As soon as we start developing the capability to detect something, the technology moves on again. That is the huge difference.

On the lessons that can be drawn from that, we need to be extremely vigilant and have good procedures in place in any scenario. We do not fully know what happened in The Irish Timescase. Many hoaxes have been perpetrated on international media, such as fake profiles, including LinkedIn profiles linking to blog posts which might have been built up over years, making it appear to be a real person.