In the past couple of years there has been a collapse of many forms of media in this country. The reason for this has been that the authors of content are not getting paid for their material. It is not that no one is getting paid for the material; there is a cohort of individuals who are getting paid, but they are the people who are creating the content. Journalism is an example. It is a key pillar of a functional democracy but it is dying on its feet because social media is taking the creative content and selling it for clicks and for advertising revenue. That is plainly wrong, but the political establishment does not have the backbone to stand up to the large social media firms and, as a result, this is happening. If the creators of the content do not get paid, after a while content does not get created. The same thing happened in the music industry. Instead of artists selling records, tapes and CDs, a small number of firms started to monetise other people's content on platforms such as YouTube and Spotify and paid a pittance for the content they were selling. This means that those in the music industry have to rely on music performance in the main to be able to have a full-time career in music generation. That has significantly reduced the generation of content in music over the past number of years. AI is bringing the whole process a large step further. A small number of very large powerful billionaires can now scrape the content of thousands of artists, authors, graphic designers and musicians and replicate similar content. It is true that the quality of this content is significantly off the creativity of human content but it is already being monetised. It is already in competition with real artists for ears, eyes and wallets. As a result, it is already shutting down content creation. There will come a time, if we are honest, that the differential and quality will narrow in the future. Let us be honest, what is happening is theft. It is the stealing of other people's content. It is individual companies making a profit out of other people's work. People might be au fait with the legend that copyright was first developed in Ireland. It is recorded that St. Colmcille secretly copied the manuscript of St. Finian at night. This was discovered by St. Finian and he demanded the replica manuscript back. He felt the reproduction of the manuscript was rightfully his. He brought the case to the High King of Ireland, Diarmait mac Cerbaill. The latter sided with St. Finian, saying the famous phrase that to every cow belongs her calf and, therefore, to every book belongs its copy. What is happening here in relation to AI is in direct opposition to this. This has a number of significant outputs. Not only is it stealing and impoverishing generations of artists, and not only is it reducing the creative output, but it is also concentrating power into the hands of a very small number of tech oligarchs across the planet. This generation has probably seen one of the biggest concentrations of wealth in the hands of so few. I do not think this has happened since the end of the 19th century. I ask in that the Government side with the artists and ensures that there is an ecosystem in which they can operate, get paid properly and deliver content into the future.

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