Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael)
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470. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine if officials from his Department are using an application (details supplied) to conduct business; if his Department has had official meetings regarding the use of the application by officials; if his Department has assessed the risk of using the application by Department officials and the input of Government-related data into the application; if his Department is using or is considering using other forms of artificial intelligence; if his Department is considering banning the use of the application by Department officials; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [21088/23]

Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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My Department has not used ChatGPT to conduct business and there have been no official meetings held regarding the use of this application. When ChatGPT was initially released, the tool was briefly explored for answering technical or software related questions. It was determined that the tool was of little benefit and was not subsequently used. No data or information was uploaded or shared with the platform.

My Department takes a risk-based approach to the installation of any application used in the Department, and all applications must be used in line with Department policies and in line with advice provided by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

Artificial Intelligence is used for the following use cases within my Department, however all use cases are subject to human review, data protection and governance measures:

- Predicting the likelihood of TB outbreaks.

- Image Analysis of crop claimed under CAP schemes.

- Image analysis for identifying species susceptible to H5N1 (Bird flu).

- Customer Segmentation analysis for developing Agri-Food policies.

- Analysis for identifying risk factors for Microbial Food Safety.

- Smart Text analysis to prevent and contain data breaches.

In addition, the Area Monitoring System (AMS) within my Department uses Machine Learning, Neural Networks and Deep Learning to process Sentinel Satellite data as required by EU regulations.