I thank Deputy Ó Snodaigh for bringing this motion forward. As Deputy Paul Murphy indicated, People Before Profit is very happy to support and commend all the artists, organisations, musicians and so on who are campaigning to bring this forward. I hope the fact that the Government is not opposing the motion means that it is actually going to take it seriously and do something in response to it. I have to say, I have my doubts about that. Before we even started to discuss AI in a serious way in this House, I do not know how many times the same organisations who are campaigning for this have asked us to raise - and we have - the extreme poverty that so many people who work in the arts and music have to endure in this country. It is absolutely incredible that about 50% to 57% of all professional artists in this country live on or below the poverty line - three times the level of poverty in Irish society generally. These are the people we are very happy to jump into photographs with when they win an award or achieve something wonderful because of their artistic ability but on a day-to-day basis the Government fails abysmally to keep them from living in poverty and to truly value the contribution they make to our society and culture. I do not know how many times we came in here campaigning on behalf of Equity and others who were campaigning for their fair and equitable remuneration for the work they do in areas like film and TV. That has still not been accomplished, as they are forced to sign buy-out contracts and not given proper payment for the work they do. Against that background, we are seeing these billionaires who run AI looking to steal en masse all of the artistic and creative output of humanity and to profit from it. The artists rightly are asking what the Government is going to do to prevent them making a bad situation for most artists and performers even worse. As Deputy Paul Murphy said, the Government's approach to AI to date has just been to get down on their knees and ask the tech bros what they want. They have got massive tax breaks to the tune of tens of billions of euro every year and anything they want in terms of the proliferation of data centres. I will tell the Minister of State one thing. When we think about 80% of the electricity in Dublin being used by data centres now, it is absolutely unbelievable. On a global level, the consumption of electricity by data centres is due to go up elevenfold by 2030. They are hoovering up the water resources and electricity resources of the planet. There will not be much human creativity, art or music if we have no water and no energy. That is what is going on with these people. They are literally hoovering it up. As has been said, the Government has bought the Kool-Aid, and so has the European Commission, it seems. Certainly Donald Trump does not pretend about his relationship with these monsters, quite frankly, in many cases, when you think about Palantir and Peter Thiel and what they do with AI, using it to help prosecute a genocide in Gaza. These people are horrific. I have difficulty with the idea that this has anything useful to contribute. I am not saying AI has no value at all. These people actually want to replace human beings and human creativity with AI. That would literally be the road to disaster for humanity. Some people think about AI as if it is cutting edge and the most advanced thing possible, but AI is like the Neanderthal. The Neanderthal had a bigger brain than the human being but it went extinct because its huge brain was mainly dealing with memory and sensory processing and was not able to do the higher functions that the human brain does. What makes us unique, and what made the human being adapt successfully while the Neanderthal died out, is our creative capacity. I refer to our capacity to imagine things that do not exist and not just to scrape memory. The problem with scraping memory is that it does not involve developing something new. It is not real innovation; it is just mixing around existing memories. That was why the Neanderthal went extinct. What will happen if we leave creativity and the future of human society to AI? I am even beginning to wonder about people generating parliamentary questions using AI. How soon before these parliamentary questions are answered using AI? AI will be asking the questions and AI will be answering them. That is where we are going. We have to stop. The Government should not buy this nonsense. AI may have some uses if it is subordinate to, in this case, what the artists, musicians and their representatives want. If we want a solution to this problem, we should talk to the people in the Gallery.

Sentiment score: 0.02