I welcome the opportunity to speak on the motion, not only as a Teachta Dála but also as someone who trained and worked as a journalist for many years creating original output and as someone who has had stints as a singer-songwriter, writing and recording original works, and who hopes to do so again in the future. I do see genuine uses of AI as a tool to speed up your creative process and to generate ideas based on your own original human spark and ideas, but, to be clear, the dangers for artists vastly outweigh the benefits, and that needs to be redressed. What is happening brings the name of the band from the 1980s Pop Will Eat Itself to entirely new levels. AI bottom trawls for free, pays nobody their due reward and then regenerates original ideas into a mishmash that sounds plausible, reads plausible and looks plausible, were it not for the fact that the AI output is input-output. It is only as good as what it trawls through. We have seen the rise of AI artists, AI music, AI authors and AI video generators. Admittedly, some of them are parodies but others are deliberate scams to outline the possibilities of the technology. Increasingly, things are being created for its own sake and the profits do not go to any original artists. Nobody can tell which aspect of a work is being used in the generative process, but it is guaranteed that the graft of artists is nowhere in it. What emerges are not the original ideas of AI, the programmers or the big multinationals that own these companies. We have had a constant fight over decades to ensure creative work is valued as labour and not treated as a hobby or a free resource. Music artists, for example, had to put up with reduced mechanical and performance royalties from streaming services. Increasingly as Deputy Tóibín referred to, people have sought refuge in live performance. So far, it is the last retreat of human artistic endeavour, but for how long? It used to be that live music was to promote recorded works but now recorded works promote live music to a larger extent. If recorded works are being threatened by AI derivatives where will our future writers, singers, actors and film directors be? They will not exist. In light of that, I welcome the motion. We in Ireland have always understood that art in itself has value. It is always a work or a craft; even if the process of inspiration can strike like lightening sometimes, it is often honed and edited over a much longer period. We cannot automate this lived human experience or our imagination. I read somewhere recently that our innate evolution as a species was due to becoming storytellers around the fire. People have spent years honing skills that can never be replicated by a machine, yet today we face this challenge that we would not have anticipated years ago. Fundamentally, the economic foundation of our work as artists, including royalties, licensing commissions and performance fees, are being further eroded. This time, it is not the music industry or the publishing industry but AI and the big tech companies. The motion acknowledges the alarming findings of organisations such as the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers in relation to the explosion of AI-generated streaming fraud and the failure of existing EU mechanisms, particularly the digital Single Market copyright directive of 2019, to provide meaningful control for the artists. AI developers can legally scrape and analyse copyrighted content for training unless the creator has opted out. I will discuss the difficulties to which that gives rise in a moment. This was originally designed for search engines and data analysis tools, not generative AI, but AI companies now rely on it to justify the mass ingestion of original creative works. Transparency licensing, fair remuneration and accountability are the very least that artists are entitled to if those companies are going to trawl through their work in this way. It is slipping away, especially with the withdrawal of the AI liability directive. The latter would have given artists something we currently do not have, namely a proper mechanism to get compensation or redress when AI systems and the companies that own them essentially misuse our work or cause economic harm through reduced incomes. This directive would have introduced a rebuttable presumption of causality, meaning that if an AI system produced content clearly derived from an artist’s work, the artist would not have to prove every technical detail of how the system ingested, processed and reproduced that work. It basically states that courts may presume a causal link between the system's output and the harm caused, unless the AI developer can prove otherwise. It is a presumption of artistic integrity, and the AI company has to prove it did not steal the work. The directive would also have required disclosure obligations, thereby allowing courts to compel AI developers to reveal things like training data logs and documentation, information that is currently hidden behind this corporate wall. In welcoming this legislation, I acknowledge that a lot of what we want to do is going to be difficult when it comes to enforceability. That is very common. The directive would have helped big time. The European Commission argues that the AI Act is enough in itself, but it does not offer any civil liability disclosure rights or anything else to win a case. The motion before the House basically calls that out and asks for measures to improve the situation, so I support it. We need infrastructure at EU level to help artists. Even if every word was taken on board and we started from where we are, we will have to follow a process in respect of what is already a race against time. If we look at how the AI Act could be improved, for starters, there must be mandatory as opposed to voluntary transparency. That is in the code of practice. We need legally enforceable obligations requiring AI developers to disclose exactly what datasets they are using, what copyrighted works are included and how those works are processed. It is quite difficult, but it is technically possible. We need a European-wide registry of copyrighted works used in AI training. That would be the backbone of any licensing system. It does not need to be perfect on day one. It could start off with voluntary submissions, collective management organisations and the major publishers. It does need to start, and we should not listen to threats to the effect that companies will just pull their money and business out of Europe and move elsewhere. That does not wash. Europe is the sanctuary of basic rights. We should stand up for those rights. We also need any opt-outs to be technically enforceable. At the moment, artists can tell companies not to train AI on their work, but developers cannot reliably identify or remove that work from their datasets. The European Union should therefore require dataset tracking. We also need more powers in relation to collective licensing because individual artists do not have that power in the context of individual companies. IMRO, Recorded Artists Actors Performers, the Screen Composers Guild and their European counterparts can. The EU should establish a compulsory licensing framework such that if AI developers want to train on European creative content, then they should pay into a collective pot. That is how radio, television and streaming were made to pay dividends, even if we all argue that those dividends are too low. As already stated, getting rid of the AI liability directive was a mistake. Artists need a clear path to compensation when their work is misused, where their likenesses are impersonated and where their income is undermined by fraudulent AI content. We could show leadership here. Ireland should use its Presidency of the European Council to push for a more targeted and effective directive. Performers should have explicit legal control over their voice, their face, their movement and their personal and artistic identity. I welcome the motion and hope that the Minister of State will take it on board.

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