I congratulate the Minister of State on her appointment. We are likely to see swaps in some committee Chair positions in the next while. Deputy Byrne was doing a good job as committee Chair, leaving out the circumstances. I welcome the Bill. In some ways we are dealing with an issue that is accelerating at a pace we have not seen before. That is one of the reasons I support this legislation. It is not that this is the only part of the armoury to deal with this; it is but one tool. We need to ensure that we have in our legislative system the tools required to react as quickly as possible. While we understand deepfakes and we can laugh about some of them, such as the crude ones that kids get up to that have been around for years, we need to think about the tools that are behind it and the ability to create deepfakes, as Deputy Byrne mentioned. At the push of a button, somebody can create my voice and play it back to somebody on a phone with me giving them an instruction. That has the potential to destroy people's careers and marriages or to result in suicide. That is on a one-to-one level, but what if it is a state actor, as they call them now, doing this? We have all had a laugh at clips of Donald Trump in Lego form coming from Iran. Literally one minute after an incident happens there is a new Lego video of Donald Trump being an idiot, as he is, but it is funny. That is the level it can be done at, and that is the speed it can be done at. That is the danger of it. Apart from us legislating for it, one of the big issues is that we have to hold the companies that have the platforms and programmes to account, those who hold the purse strings because, at the end of the day, this is all to do with money. They have to put in place the protections that are required but they also have to act when something happens. The biggest failure in the digital media age we are in is that the big companies are very slow to act. If you ring them or send them an e-mail to say what is online is libellous or if you press the button to say something is malicious, it does not get taken down straight away. It is not suspended while the company adjudicates. In the vast majority of cases where I have reacted to posts or stuff online, it has never been taken down. What version of our law are they reading? If somebody accuses you online of a crime, that is the equivalent of libel. While you can go to court, by the time you get there it will have been seen by hundreds, thousands or millions of people because of the speed of technology. It is not suspended until you win the case. If I make a charge, it should be suspended while the company adjudicates. I have no problem with that. As regards the incident we are dealing with, the programme most people were discussing at the time was Grok but it is not just one programme. It did not stop there, because that kind of ability to use people's images and to manipulate them and present them as reality is still available. We must have a way to protect people. Our image is our image. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures of me. I am not too precious about whatever shape, size or whatever I am, but my image cannot be taken and put into another image to create a fake. I worked in the media for years so I know how to use images, but now it can literally be done by a child. There is now a Bollywood film that was created from ten other films. The main actor is dead. All of the songs are new songs but they use his voice. The film has been sold and people have gone to see it, knowing it is not a fake but something created by AI that is considered brilliant. None of the other actors got a penny and the main actor is dead. The only people who benefit are those in the film company. That raises the issue of the protection of the image and who owns it when you die. Does your partner or your family own it? This presents dangers. Mention was made of Nixon and the moon landing. We can all laugh at that, but if somebody like Deputy Byrne can be taken in, it just shows what is possible. That occurred a number of years ago. We have gone beyond that. Things can be smoothed out. You do not see six fingers on people any more in the pictures. It has gone beyond it. This technology is learning the whole time. It is now at the stage where it is teaching itself from its mistakes and identifying them. That is the nature of it. I am not afraid of it, but there are a lot of people who are afraid of it. A lot of older people are panicking. We have to find some way of helping them get around the problems that exist and teach them how to identify, as much as we can, what is fake and what is not fake. The only way we can do that is to show them examples. Way back when I was only a young fella, about 50 years ago, I remember doing a course in school. We had an imaginative teacher and he taught a media studies course. It was an extra class. He used to show us different pictures. He would block out one part and show that blocking out the context could change the interpretation and the purpose of the image. That was a photograph in a classroom of kids who were 13 or 14 years old. Now we have a computer that can do that and a lot more, for example, change the scenery or the background. It can be done for fun sometimes, which is what most people are doing, but it is not for fun when you start manipulating somebody's voice and what they are saying. We have laws that protect us in some ways already. The Minister of State referred to some of them, but we have to be able to act quickly. Some of our laws were brought in to deal with libel. It was a form of assault on people. The way to assault people now is through an image. You went to court and took action but the damage was restricted to a small circle of people who saw it. If it was on The Irish Times, you had a circle of maybe 50,000 people in the whole country who saw it and it died. If it was on the television, maybe a few more saw it. Now, literally at the click of a button, a million people can see it, so the damage is done there and then. How do you call that image back? How do you call back screenshots and everything else? How do you stop people sharing? We saw, even this week, images that should not be shared. Those very graphic images from Belfast were shared worldwide in an instant and then used by other actors. That was not a case of anybody doing anything to change those images, but a voice-over could be put on it. I think it was only a few hours later that the second person was there. There was no such thing and it was proven. However, it gets a head of steam and that head of steam is what you are trying to protect against here, to make sure that people understand it is illegal to do it in the first place but then that you have the power to stop it and to call it back before it does further damage. I support this. There are concerns about the freedom of speech, satire, etc., and we will address them on Committee Stage, when this gets to the committee, because it is important we do as much of this collegially as possible. It is not only us as politicians being precious; it is our whole society.

Sentiment score: -0.02