Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity)
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The Taoiseach wrote an opinion piece in the Business Post a number of months ago in which he said we needed to act decisively now across the whole of government to accelerate the adoption of AI across the public sector, enterprise and wider society. In the article he compared the significance of AI to the industrial revolution and the printing press. The role of the committee should be to say "Let us take a minute". Let us not say the whole of government is going to commit to accelerating AI before we have a chance to have some democratic discussion about the good, useful and bad applications of AI. There has been a massive hype machine built up by big tech corporations which want to inflate their share prices in the short term and increase their profits in the medium to long term. There are then governments like our own following in their wake without having a reasonable discussion about the implications of AI.

One negative implication is the massive expansion of energy use. Trump has spoken about doubling energy use in the US through coal to facilitate AI. That will make it impossible for us to meet our climate targets. Asking a query of ChatGPT uses as much electricity as having a light bulb on for 20 minutes. Is that what we want to do as a society?

AI will lead to the degradation of our public spaces and culture through the proliferation of fake news. We no longer get accurate information from a Google search. We used to get accurate information from Google, but we now get an AI summary which will contain hallucinations of fake news. That is not even being done deliberately. AI is used to spread false information, narratives and so on.

There will be an impact on cultural production, whereby AI will undermine the role of journalists, artists and so on, which is something we need to examine, as well as civil liberties.