I welcome this very straightforward amendment to Coco's Law. It makes it very clear that the crime of recording or distributing non-consensual intimate images of a person also extends to images and videos created by AI. Over recent months, we have seen an explosion in the use of AI technology distributing sexual abuse material, particularly of women and children. The use of AI bots to abuse people online is completely unacceptable. This has to be stopped. The way we do this is by bringing this Bill forward and putting it in place. We also need to ensure that gardaí have the resources to make sure that those who are breaking the law are held to account. We heard last month from the gardaí that they are investigating around 200 cases of sexual abuse material from the Grok AI tool alone. That is an enormous amount of work, especially when one considers that the overwhelming majority of these accounts posting this material online are anonymous. On top of investigating those who are directly creating the images, we need to see these companies that are flouting the law held to account. If we do not begin to tackle this behaviour and if guardrails are not put in place to prevent this sort of abuse, then they have to face serious crimes and the possibility of a criminal investigation.

Sentiment score: -0.14