There was an interesting opinion poll a few weeks ago that showed only 27% of Irish people had a positive view of AI compared with 48% who believed that it would be a force for bad in the coming years. Research by RED C found that Irish people have among the lowest levels of trust in AI in the world. That demonstrates some good sense. Why? I think it is because people smell a rat. This is being forced down our throats by big tech and by propaganda from a Government that is in thrall to big tech. People get it. This is not improving my life. It is not making my life easier. Last year, the Taoiseach told us that AI was "in the same realm as the industrial revolution, and the printing press". I challenged him on this on one occasion and he stood over it, 100%. He said this was just as significant as the printing press or the industrial revolution. His conclusion was that the EU needed to innovate more and regulate less when it came to AI, that it must not "tie companies up in knots so that don't over-regulate to the extent that we paralyse certain sectors of the economy". On Tuesday, he said that arresting the people in X who were responsible for Grok producing child sexual abuse imagery would be like 1984. How low can he go in bending over for big tech? We now have the rightful and righteous horror of people about the realities of AI and what it is being used for, but the Government is going to continue on its same track of being fundamentally subservient to big tech. What is really Orwellian are the breathless claims that AI is some kind of fourth industrial revolution. The Government has drunk the big tech Kool-Aid big time if it believes that churning out child sexual abuse imagery and misogynistic image-based sexual abuse of women on an industrial scale - over 160,000 images in one 24-hour period at the start of this year - is an industrial revolution. If it is, it is an industrial revolution that ordinary people want no part of. This is a revolution of the warped, big tech billionaires and their Government cheerleaders. They want this pollution in our lives because it makes them so much money. If you look at Musk's reaction to the scandal, it was to say that the feature would be limited to subscribers in order to monetise it. For depraved billionaires like Musk, Zuckerberg or Bezos, there is no such thing as bad publicity, only free advertising and opportunities. To hell with the human or the environmental cost. Their latest reaction to attempt to assuage public concern was to geolimit it. In other words, if a person has a virtual private network, VPN, they will be able to continue to access and produce this abusive and illegal imagery. The background to the latest AI scandal is the Covalen strike. Content moderators hired by big tech and outsourced to police the wild west that it has created are to be replaced by AI. Anybody worried about AI should support this strike. Without humans moderating it and social media, it will become even more of a hellscape than it is already. Content moderation is an incredibly hard job that is traumatic. It should be highly paid and carried out by humans. Otherwise, child protection is going to be left to AI. Does any parent want that? The only way that the AI revolution is genuinely industrial is in the escalating demand for power and for water-hungry data centres. The 19th century industrial revolution turbocharged the burning of fossil fuels for profit, ultimately laying the basis for the climate crisis. The AI revolution is doubling down on that, accelerating climate collapse. Donald Trump told the World Economic Forum last year that he wanted to double US energy production to power AI and big tech and that they could fuel it with anything they wanted, including coal. Our Government is following Trump's lead by bending over backwards to facilitate data centre expansion. Data centres are already maxing out the grid. They are already swallowing up electricity that we need for housing and public transport even though we do not know what is going on. We got a glimpse from the genocide in Gaza where Irish data centres were holding Israel Defense Forces, IDF, intelligence data used to target and murder whole families. They are used to train AI using vast amounts of stolen data created by artists, creatives and ordinary people in their social media posts. They store vast amounts of our personal data that they use to target us with advertising and algorithms. Next week, I will be introducing our online safety recommender algorithms Bill to turn off these hateful toxic algorithms for children under the age of 18 and turn them off by default for adult users.

Sentiment score: -0.09