Professor Barry O'Sullivan:

I will come back to Deputy Creed's questions. On the question of whether there is international best practice, I say that AI governance is a topic that is divided by a common language. What I mean by that is if you were to pick up the ethics guidelines in China, in Europe and in the United States, they all look like they are saying the same thing, but when you peel away what they are really saying, for example, when they all say they respect human rights, they all have a slightly different definition of what human rights is. If you sit in an ethics debate at an international level about human rights, you will spend 80% of your time arguing, believe it or not, in 2024, whether women have the same rights as men or whether LGBTQ is a thing. It is amazing that there is not international consensus on the very basic things that you would expect there to be international consensus on. That is the first point. Even though things look the same, they are not the same. That makes it very difficult to have international best practice.

This year is going to be a very interesting year. We are now in the Super Bowl of democracy. In the next year, 3 billion people will go to the ballot box. There will be an insane amount of AI technology generating deep fakes on an hourly, if not minute, basis. The entirety of legislators, such as the committee members, and society in general will become extremely concerned about this technology. We will be having a very different debate about AI technology in six months' time than we are now.

If I may say so, it is regrettable that the big AI companies went to Congress last year asking the US to regulate them. These are the wealthiest companies in the world which really do not believe what they were saying because they did not go home and turn off their AI systems. In fact, they upgraded them and made more of them. On the international level, unfortunately, there is not best practice.

There is a concern in Europe we should be aware of that, while we are fantastic at regulation, we produce some of the leading lights in AI but they do not work here. They work in China and in the United States. Europe is essentially an importer of this technology. We need to be cognisant of the impact of regulation on essentially making Europe a user of imported and in some sense secondary technologies. It is really challenging.

Dr. Ryan raises a very interesting issue around the responsibility of different platforms. One of the challenges that we have in Ireland is that the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022 regulates two completely different worlds and they share a common staple. In one, there is the regular media, editorial control, publication and responsibility. On the other hand, we have no editorial control and no form of publication. These are not the same. We really need to think about them differently because not only are they regulatorily different, but their potential for harm is different. If Deputy Sherlock is defamed in an article, there is someone he can go to. However, if 500,000 children are harmed by some content that has been produced in a garage somewhere, how do we go after the person who has produced the content? That is not so clear.