I thank Sinn Féin for bringing this motion for IMRO, for its campaigning on this issue and for the artists who have spoken out and highlighted it. It is high time that this Government, which has gulped down big tech's Kool-Aid and regurgitated it for the public in an unthinking way, is forced to reflect on the downsides of AI, which are very many, not just for artists and the creatives in our society, but for our society as a whole. I do not think anyone wants a world where the majority of the Internet and the majority of even supposedly creative content is AI slop, but that is the future we are heading towards. That is the future unless we collectively call stop and pull the brake on generative AI. It is not an unstoppable train even now. In the AI committee, we have been treated to person after person telling us this is unstoppable. Lots of people have correctly said it is not unstoppable, but the big tech line is this is unstoppable and you have to get on this train or else you are going to lose out. That is a narrative of inevitability deliberately created and propagated by the big tech companies who profit from AI, who want to profit from AI in the future, and who are currently gambling billions on it. They are in it up to their necks right now and they want to put us all in the same situation so that it becomes impossible for us to turn back. They want to hook us on generative AI like they have hooked us on social media and then start charging us through the nose for it, whether that is through user fees, advertising or selling our personal data to the highest bidder. There is an immense hypocrisy here. I am old enough to remember those ads that started with "You wouldn't steal a car." I went and watched the ad. It says: "You wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't steal a handbag, you wouldn't steal a television, you wouldn't steal a DVD but downloading pirated films is stealing." It finishes with "Piracy. It's a crime." I remember what came after that, which was a furore about Napster, LimeWire and The Pirate Bay. Ordinary people who downloaded an album or a video were demonised as pirates and threatened with court cases, fines and even prison sentences. Even today, ordinary people can be criminalised if they download material illegally as opposed to using legal streaming services. Legal streaming services are epitomised by Spotify, whose whole business model is based on ripping off artists financially, which it is, and now, through generative AI, ripping off and copying their music and turning it into AI slop as well. Now that we have a situation whereby big tech has effectively pirated pretty much the entire creative output of humanity, what is the official response? Are the big tech bosses being rounded up? Are they being arrested? Are they being told, "You wouldn't steal a car", given that they have stolen effectively all of the music that has ever been created? Talk about one rule for us and another for those at the top. We do not get that. We do not get any arrests. We do not get any kicking down the doors of the big tech companies. Instead, we get world leaders and our own Taoiseach rabbiting on about a fourth industrial revolution that will change everything and saying that this is as important as the printing press. We need to recognise this as the pure corporate propaganda that it is and start asking who benefits from it. Certainly not artists or not musicians, and it will not benefit people generally either. This motion is right to warn that generative AI may lead to a decline in the quality of human cultural and creative production. The truth is that is already happening. The tech industry wants us to outsource our brains to AI and to let it do our thinking, writing and creating for us. It sounds to me like a very dystopian future that we should be doing everything in our power to avoid. Something in it gets to the heart of the kind of anti-humanist philosophy that many of these big tech leaders spout. There was one recently talking about being confronted with the cost of training AI. They said it costs a lot to train humanity. Look at all the food you have to feed a baby and all the energy you have to commit to a baby to raise a human. They said a human takes more energy than AI to develop. It is a deeply anti-humanist philosophy. These people fundamentally do not get it - that what makes art and music special is human input. That is what we see in it. That is what we appreciate. You cannot create it by generative AI. The fight-back against AI has to start now. We can start by legislating for the right to opt out of AI. No worker or user of public or private services should be forced to interact with AI and have AI deal with their data without their consent. We also need to place real limits on data centres. They are using up 80% of the electricity in Dublin and an unknown quantity of water. It may be the reason for the restrictions that we are currently seeing, but we do not know because they do not have to tell us how much water they are using. Despite the data centres being so huge already, they want to double. They want to double so that they can deal with the insatiable demand of AI. That cannot be allowed to happen. If it does, it makes it impossible for us to reach our climate targets. We need an outright ban on more data centres being built and we need real restrictions on the ones that are already here. People's needs - our need for a society which is meaningful and produces decent art - and the needs of artists and creative people, all that needs to come before the profits of big tech in our society.

Sentiment score: 0.10