Europe at ‘critical moment’ to regulate AI, conference on ethics and media copyright told

Europe is at a “critical moment” in effective regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), the chairman of the Oireachtas committee on AI warned. “Countries that get ahead will stay ahead” and those “that fall behind will stay behind” in the race to master the new technology.The comments by Fianna Fáil’s Naoise Ó Cearúil came at a conference on Copyright and Human Creativity in the Age of AI which focused on how to implement copyright claims ethically and protect intellectual property rights as the AI sector encroaches on the creative and media industries. The conference hosted by NewsBrands Ireland, a representative body of news publishers, and the Irish Recorded Music Association, was organised as part of the State’s six-month presidency of the Council of the European Union.Journalist and broadcaster Dearbhail McDonald, who moderated the discussion, said this balancing act had “created an extinction-level event for many news publishers”.READ MORERuadhán Mac Cormaic, editor of The Irish Times, said the large language models (LLMs) that support AI-powered chatbot services “hoovered up areas of the internet and didn’t ask for any permission”, effectively leading to “billion-dollar companies pretty much overnight as a result of others’ intellectual property”.“To me, and I think to most ordinary, reasonable people – that looks like theft,” he said.“I think a fair summary of what the industry, in general, wants is a level playing field, a situation in which we are being fairly compensated for the original, creative work that we produce,” Mac Cormaic said.AI more broadly “is really exciting technology for us and it is transforming the way that we work”, he said. Journalists “spend a lot of time working on very mundane tasks, on our website working tagging and that sort of back-end information work”.“We hope to eliminate a lot of that work so as to enable journalists to engage in original, creative work,” Mac Cormaic said. However AI’s rapid development has “forced us to rethink basic understandings we have of what knowledge means, what news means, what information looks like”.“These are fundamental questions that we don’t yet have answers to, but we’re grappling with everyday,” Mac Cormaic said.Ó Cearúil, who has chaired the Oireachtas joint committee on AI since June, called for global participation in piecing together regulatory guidelines. “We’ve seen instances in the past of international treaties on the likes of nuclear energy; we do need some sort of agreement when it comes to artificial intelligence,” he said.“If we don’t get it right now, it’ll be a freight train,” he said. “Now is the moment for us to actually push towards regulation, to push towards adoption on an individual and organisational basis.”On a global scale, “we have completely failed [to regulate effectively] with social media”, Ó Cearúil said. “We need to ensure that there is some sort of global or international agreement ... when it comes to how AI is being developed.“What we really need to be looking at with AI”, he said, is “how we can relieve ourselves of administrative burdens to allow us to be creative, to allow us the freedom of thought […] and do what separates us from machines”.