Artificial intelligence (AI) could destroy democratic institutions in Ireland, the Oireachtas Committee on Artificial Intelligence has heard.
The committee has heard from the National Union of Journalists, Media Literacy Ireland and NewsBrand Ireland.
The areas being discussed include the rise of misinformation and disinformation, AI-enabled deepfakes, copyright law and the generation of fake articles.
NewsBrands Ireland represents 16 national news publishers in Ireland.
Its chair, Sammi Bourke, warned: “Publishers in Ireland are now under grave threat. As a result, so too is truth, and so too is democracy.
“[The] actions and decisions taken now will determine whether AI strengthens our democratic institutions or quietly destroys them.”
Ms Bourke said that original reporting is being harvested to feed LLMs (large language models).
Tech firms “[refuse] to pay for” that reporting, and this is threatening the future of journalism, Ms Bourke said.
Dr Eileen Culloty, who leads the European Digital Media Observatory, said AI has unleashed a flood of “scams and low quality slop”.
While the technology is convenient, it is “fundamentally unreliable”, she added.
“Flawed and opaque AI systems are undermining human reasoning,” Dr Culloty told the committee.
NUJ Assistant General Secretary Séamus Dooley said that AI is not simply an economic activity, but is of fundamental importance to democracy.
“There is an urgent need for oversight,” he said, noting recent job cuts at The Washington Post which coincided with its owner Jeff Bezos making further massive investments in AI, a contrast in resource allocation which gives an indication of what the future holds.
He condemned “the wholesale robbery of material” by tech firms created by NUJ members, who are frequently “discovering use of their work without consent or compensation”.
Ms Bourke also said that more than three quarters of people who use an AI search do not click through to the source material used to generate the summary.
All that traffic – which used to go to news sites after a google search – has now been lost, she added.
Asked by Fine Gael TD James Geoghegan whether subscriptions will allow media organisations to adapt to these changes, Ms Bourke said “content behind paywalls is still being scraped”.