Mr. Ronan Lupton:

I do not think there is any bowing. I refer to something being generated on ChatGPT on instruction and then published by an individual. For example, if I said “Give me a run down or a précis of Deputy Richard Bruton”, 90% of it is false and if I then run that in my newspaper, it is defamatory. What would the Deputy do? He would sue for defamation. I would say it was generated by ChatGPT and he should sue ChatGPT. The Deputy might just do that too. In other words, the rules and liability position now allow the Deputy to sue me as the publisher, because I would have published that, but he could also sue ChatGPT as well. It is a slightly interesting dynamic. If you think about everything, throw it on a whiteboard and say the future is this in terms of the legal changes required from the point of view of litigating matters rather than the point of view of where the technology is going, and ask if we should change the rules of engagement, duty of care, damage, tort, if you want to put it that way – it is probably the best way to put it – the answer is “No. Not right now.” because, ultimately, you will be able to find the tortfeasor. Someone may say it is a machine. The answer is the owner of the machine, because we will go after them. However, it should not be a strict liability situation because, ultimately, Ronan Lupton might have said that he wants to have the following précis on Deputy Bruton in the following way, about, for example, cooking online, what his particular constituency is or whatever it happens to be. Deputy Bruton would have recourse to the courts under the pre-existing mechanisms by which people vindicate their rights.

I wish to pick up on an interesting observation on the market power of the future or current technology platforms. I will do it by analogy to the Digital Markets Act. I hope members of this committee have heard about the gatekeeper provisions for the very large platforms and how they behave. They are the same platforms that, in many instances, will have developed AI and AI technology. It may be that the commission can extend or even use those frameworks at this stage to break the monopolistic behaviour on the markets – I guess market power is the same thing – or it may need to be developed further. It has to be European level, as far as I can see, because of the size of those organisations.

Another observation is if we look back 20 years ago, Facebook, Google and other big names did not feature on our landscapes. Back to Professor O’Hare’s observation, new entities and emerging technologies will come forward and the question is how to regulate them, because they will be below the radar. Deputy O’Reilly picked up on this and Dr. Bambrick did too. These are going to be new developers, innovators and people placing new items onto the market that fundamentally are self-certified. Again, it is back to this issue of regulatory governance and regulatory impact assessment. The issue of human autonomy, reputational harm and explainabilty are the three principles that Deputy Bruton highlighted. They are all there but how do they intermingle with the other rights? Professor O’Hare was right about this. Ultimately, we have the general data protection regulation framework, which is the processing of personal data. That should work hand in glove with the AI Act, insofar as people can vindicate their rights and deployers, developers and controllers of the data who are deploying AI systems must comply with the GDPR norm. How to cope with all of this is a massive question for the data protection regulators. We as a nation, but also a European nation, will see a massive change in complaints in this.

I made this point in my opening statement. The US is moving on this now. It did not move on data protection. It has a patchwork of data protection. It is not even the same as the European legislation in certain US states, which does not go anywhere near vindicating the data rights of US citizens. Whereas with AI, it is saying “Well hang on now. We have sit up here because this is important.”