Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Senator Seery Kearney asked the question "Who owns your image?" It is a good question. The Senator will remember that this Government passed a law some years ago in respect of intimate images. This legislation had previously been introduced by Deputy Brendan Howlin. It is an important law and I believe it was generally widely welcomed. It prevents people from using intimate images to influence or to attack their former girlfriend or boyfriend, which was generally what was going on there. The Senator is asking a broader question as to who has ownership if the image if it is not of an intimate nature and is just an image of a person. That has not been fully resolved. A person's photograph, for example, can be taken in a public place and then used. For example, it could be used by a news outlet. I do not believe there is anything a person can do about that. Similarly, when someone the victim of a crime often, his or her photographs from social media may appear in news media and there would not have been any consent. That can be upsetting for the family involved.

A question was asked about deep fakes where a video image is doctored, for example to make a politician say something that he or she should not be saying. This is an aspect of hybrid warfare. It is the idea of misinformation or the doctoring of images to persuade a populace to turn on somebody. After the 2016 election in the United States of America and the Brexit referendum in the UK, there was a general fear across the world that this type of activity would be engaged in by nation states as a form of hybrid warfare.

Ireland joined the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki in January. I was honoured to be the person who signed Ireland up to that. This is a group of different countries, EU members and also NATO members, researching together on how to protect their countries from this type of threat. It is a research facility that publishes nearly everything it does. This issue will come to the fore in the forthcoming EU elections, the local elections next year and the general election that follows. There is a general threat from other countries influencing elections, including the candidates they want to win, in order to cause chaos in the other country. We need to work hard to protect ourselves from that.

We are all the more vulnerable as a result of generative AI. One of the key new things that this AI can do is to convincingly pretend to be human. This can then be used to create social media bots and characters on the Internet who appear to be spreading stories against one party and putting forward ideas that have come from another country and have a different set of values to us. Europe and Ireland have shared moral values. We support democracy and freedom. This is not the case in other countries that would seek to influence our elections. It is a real problem.

Reference was made to watermarking - although that word was not used - and that we might embed something into an image to see where it had come from. This is certainly a way by which we can trace what has happened. We should follow what is going on in this regard in the EU, which is currently making law around AI. It has been doing this for the past two years, but there is a sudden new sense of impetus with the arrival of ChatGPT. The EU Parliament has signed off on its section of the law, and we are coming towards the end of it. One of the recommendations from the Parliament is there would be tagging on content created by AI. For example, if AI wrote a report, it would have to say at the end that it had been written by ChatGPT. I do not know how that segment would not be cut off it, so it would have to be watermarked or have information deeply embedded into it to show that it had come from an AI.

I will be issuing guidelines to the public sector shortly on how we use AI, which is a very powerful tool. We are not going to ignore AI. It is very useful for research and productivity purposes, but we cannot have a situation where, for example, public sector officials are replying to people's letters and using AI to do so. We cannot have a situation where AI is writing our strategies or policies. I do not want to come in here and find that Senators have had amendments written by AI and that these, if accepted, could form part of our laws. These are all real risks. These are all commonsense things, but we need to write them down in the form of guidelines. Those guidelines will be issued in the coming weeks.

The Senator also asked about the challenge of recruiting people into the public sector for cybersecurity. I have direct experience of this. At the time of the cyberattack on the HSE, there were 27 people working in the National Cyber Security Centre. We now have double that number. We are able to recruit people. We are offering something slightly different from the private sector. We are offering meaningful work relating to the defence of the country. We are using the types of tools that are not available in the commercial sector. We liaise with military intelligence and with larger countries. The proposition to the worker is that he or she has interesting and meaningful work using the latest technologies available, which is not always the case when someone is simply protecting financial assets in a bank or a software company. We are managing to recruit.

Senator Warfield asked how the Department of Justice can be involved in the procurement of facial recognition technology before there is a legal basis for its use. The coalition Government has decided to proceed with the Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) Bill 2022, which provides a legal basis for the use of bodycams by gardaí, but not to legislate for facial recognition technology. We will do that in a separate Bill. The reason for this is that the facial recognition technology had not been through a pre-legislative scrutiny and had not been subject to a strong, democratic debate across the country. We need input from experts. The use of such technology would represent a major change in the context of civil rights. We need to work out where the use of this technology is useful, acceptable and welcome and where it goes too far. That is being worked out at the moment. There is no reason the Department cannot buy the software, it simply cannot deploy it until it has a legal basis to use it.

The Senator asked about the recruitment of additional data protection commissioners. I will ask the Minister for Justice, Deputy McEntee, about that. He asked if there is any more data protection legislation in train. Again, I will ask the Minister for Justice and come back to the Senator with answers. Ireland is well aware of its key position as the regulator of tech companies in Europe. We are in that position because so many high-tech companies are putting their headquarters in Ireland. We are aware of our responsibility to regulate those companies carefully. We are aware that the Data Protection Commission needs to be fully resourced and supported. We are committing to other member states in Europe that we are going to continue to do that. That is most of what I want to say. I thank Senators.