Artificial intelligence (AI) could destroy democratic institutions in Ireland, the Oireachtas Committee on Artificial Intelligence has heard.<\/p>\n
The committee has heard from the National Union of Journalists, Media Literacy Ireland and NewsBrand Ireland.<\/p>\n
The areas being discussed include the rise of misinformation and disinformation, AI-enabled deepfakes, copyright law and the generation of fake articles.<\/p>\n
NewsBrands Ireland represents 16 national news publishers in Ireland.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“[The] actions and decisions taken now will determine whether AI strengthens our democratic institutions or quietly destroys them.”<\/p>\n
Ms Bourke said that original reporting is being harvested to feed LLMs (large language models).<\/p>\n
Tech firms “[refuse] to pay for” that reporting, and this is threatening the future of journalism, Ms Bourke said.<\/p>\n
Dr Eileen Culloty, who leads the European Digital Media Observatory, said AI has unleashed a flood of “scams and low quality slop”.<\/p>\n
While the technology is convenient, it is “fundamentally unreliable”, she added.<\/p>\n
“Flawed and opaque AI systems are undermining human reasoning,” Dr Culloty told the committee.<\/p>\n
NUJ Assistant General Secretary S\u00e9amus Dooley said that AI is not simply an economic activity, but is of fundamental importance to democracy.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
All that traffic – which used to go to news sites after a google search – has now been lost, she added.<\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Artificial intelligence (AI) could destroy democratic institutions in Ireland, the Oireachtas Committee on Artificial Intelligence has heard. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-290817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}