Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I might have been better had I used ChatGPT or something else to write a speech for me. I did not and I will go for a more traditional method of dealing with this.

In fairness, and I might never say this again over the next four years, I agree with the previous speaker from the opposite bench, especially on the need to look at holding special hearings. We definitely need to look at having a special committee to deal with the issue of AI.

When talking about the idea of digital literacy, there would be an issue in this House in dealing with the concepts. We will be talking about something that absolutely is changing.

While 2027 might not exactly be the date on which Skynet becomes aware, and we have the disaster scenarios from "Terminator" that people fear, we have seen significant moves from simply neural networks right through to where quantum computing is at present, and it is probably only at an intermediate stage. The advantages are that you will have capacity. As this intelligence and technology improves, the idea would be that you would get a lot more bang for buck which could also deal with some of the issues we have with data centres. I also accept data centres are not going anywhere. Some of the issues we have in this State have been our failure to deal with the grid and with renewables. We really need to get everything together.

We all know the benefits that can exist, that exist in improving medical outcomes and that can happen in education. That is also to accept we may have to change the way by which students currently are graded or assessed. We have to teach people how to use tools, particularly when we are talking about generative AI, rather than make up and ensure they do not have to do anything. Members know what I mean, because that is not of any great benefit. While we need a regulatory framework, it would not make sense for us to miss out from an enterprise point of view on the productivity, innovation and necessary economic drivers they can be. We need to make sure we are absolutely on top of this in any way, shape or form.

I know we all have a fear. Some of the fear is not quite what I spoke about earlier, rather that we have seen the relationship between the tech bros and Donald Trump and we know these people want to ensure there is no regulation whatsoever on their ability to make money and wield power. We needs to make sure the Digital Services Act deals with some of the issues that exist regarding the absolute freedom they want for people to put up content so that they can maintain profits. When we are talking about artificial intelligence, it is a facility that can really benefit but it needs to be universal benefit. There is a huge amount of work that needs to be done.

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