Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for a comprehensive assessment of where we are and of what has been done. Much of the time, we do not realise how much the State is doing in this area. Obviously, the Minister of State is not in a position to declare and share everything but, from conversations with people in the area of defence and so on, I know that we actually have an extraordinary wealth of knowledge, ability and competence in cybersecurity at a national level and at the level of critical infrastructure. The Minister of State has done well. A great deal of work is being done.

While cybersecurity and data protection are inextricably linked, it is the area of data protection that I will talk about a little. I am not sure that we understand data in the way that we should. On my personal knowledge of what now constitutes data about me, what I own and what I do not and what I have control over, there was a time when you owned pieces of paper. They were in your handbag, your pocket or whatever. We do not have that now. Unbeknownst to us, there has been a cultural shift over the last ten years in particular. People give away their data all the time without any real understanding of just how much organisations are intruding into their lives. We see that when we download an app and then, all of a sudden, the ads on our social media mirror what is in our phones or what we have searched on our phones in a completely different app. There is a lack of understanding there. I am not sure what we can do about it. In a way, the horse has bolted and we are trying to close the door.

As we are running advertising campaigns on Coco's Law and the fact that it is now illegal to threaten to publish a photograph of someone else, it is interesting to note that this legislation brings a piece of ownership home. Who owns an image? Where a couple is in a relationship and one gives an image of an intimate nature to the other, who then owns that image? If that image is of me and you threaten to publish it, I own it. Ownership is of the essence. A threat to publish an image is then a threat to property, as well as to the personal autonomy of an individual.

That is very clear-cut in the case of a couple exchanging images. Where the ownership of an image is not clear-cut is where artificial intelligence, AI, is able to manipulate images, perhaps showing Ossian Smyth making a speech that is the complete antithesis of anything he would ever say. We have seen examples of that at the political level in other countries and it may potentially arise in our own country, especially as we move towards a general election. I worry about what could possibly happen there. On the potential use of AI-generated imagery, do we have the intellectual property piece of that issue nailed down? Is it the case that an image of me cannot be manipulated? How do we allow for freedom of expression? It is very complicated. When I try to get my head around these things, I think that we cannot legislate as quickly as these technologies are emerging.

It is the same with ChatGPT. We see the possibility of producing an essay for university. We need to be able to impose markers on such generated content, for example, for journalism purposes. Journalists have credentials that are accepted and believed in to allow them to carry out their investigative role. Generated content may be attributed to an individual and it does not have the same credentials. We need to embed a marker that denotes where content is from, who generated it and how it was generated in order to preserve the integrity of journalism. As to the integrity of our colleges, if I do an essay, it is put through a system by the university to be checked for plagiarism. We need a similar system to be imposed on all of these AI generation applications so that the creation of content without individuals using their own intellectual capacity can be marked. I am always wary of organisations that, for profit-driven purposes, move ahead of nation states and their ability to regulate for the common good. I like the general data protection regulation, GDPR, because it can be quite nimble in capturing emerging technologies as they relate to data. However, we still need to regulate AI. From that point of view, how do we make sure that we stay ahead?

The Minister of State spoke very eloquently about our competence in cybersecurity, our abilities and how we are growing. I know there have been instances where we have trained people through our own military and defence organisations only for them to be poached by private business. Does the Minister of State have the freedom to ensure salaries in that area are sufficient? Are they tied to the salaries of the public service? Do we have capacity to ensure we are able to poach people into our services and to hold the people we have? Critical to us being able to stay ahead is being able to hold the competencies, experience and knowledge of individuals who are in place and ensuring that the Minister of State has the financial resources to do so. That is something we should advocate for.