Taoiseach urged to ‘pick up the phone’ and call X aft…

Micheál Martin sent a letter to X that was two lines long.

THE TAOISEACH HAS been urged to “pick up the phone” and call someone in the social media company X amid criticisms that he made a “minimalistic” effort to get the media platform to appear before an Oireachtas committee.  The company had refused to appear at a meeting last month to discuss its controversial Grok AI tool. Chair of the Oireachtas media committee, Labour’s Alan Kelly asked Micheál Martin to intervene in the matter and urge the platform to attend.

The subsequent email from the Taoiseach’s private secretary to X has been released to RTÉ News under Freedom of Information. The correspondence is just two sentences long, where the Taoiseach states he wants to “draw your attention to an exchange in the Dáil” about an invitation to appear before the media committee. Kelly said today that the Taoiseach’s “functional email to X shows he just ticked a box to cover my request rather than making any real effort to ask them to come before the committee”.

“Through this minimalistic intervention, it tells us that the Taoiseach had no real intention of trying to push and help get X before the committee. This is very worrying as Meta, Google and TikTok did come before the committee and answered questions. X not being there wasn’t acceptable and certainly was disrespectful to the committee. “It really says all we need to know about how seriously the Taoiseach takes online safety,” he said.  “X and the Grok controversy caused huge concern and damage to many people.

It has pushed online safety and how Ireland is going to deal with such ecommerce companies to the top of the political agenda. That is for everyone except it seems the Taoiseach by the looks of things,” added Kelly.  Green Party senator Malcolm Noonan said “it’s more than disappointing to see that the Taoiseach writes a two-line letter to X to ask them to come into committee and talk to us”.

“We can’t continue this conversation without their presence there. It’s quite important that they come in and address the issues that we have been trying to deal with over the last number of weeks. “I would ask the Taoiseach to lift up the phone to X, to somebody in X… and talk to them, and tell them to come in and talk to us in committee about this absolute crisis in social media and what has happened over the last number of months in relation to Grok,” concluded Noonan.  Garda investigations into the generation of child sex abuse images by the AI chatbot Grok could lead to prosecutions of senior management, a Garda assistant commissioner has suggested.

Appearing before the Committee on Artificial Intelligence this morning, Angela Willis said gardaí have received 244 referrals about AI images generated by Grok. Asked by People Before Profit’s Paul Murphy if any of the investigations are into “Grok itself”, Willis said An Garda Síochána are “not ruling anything out”. She added that evidence might first involve users of the technology but said they “will spare no effort in trying to identify all of the different opportunities to bring perpetrators before the courts”.

The Assistant Commissioner for Organised and Serious Crime did say these investigations “can be quite complicated and a quite lengthy process” because of their trans-national nature and the involvement of multiple other jurisdictions. She said the gardaí will take them “as far as we can from an evidential perspective, and then we will obviously bring that information before the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP)”.

Earlier she was asked by Fine Gael’s James Geoghegan if there is a distinction, in Irish law, between “the enabler of the production” and the producer. She said “historically” investigations have focused on “whoever generated the material” but said their investigations “will go wherever the evidence leads us”, adding it would be up to the DPP to decide if a prosecution would follow.

Willis said: “But certainly in order to initiate an investigation, there is ample scope to investigate if somebody is aiding or abetting the generation of such material when it relates to a child.” Quizzed on the generation of sexual abuse images by AI image generating tools by the Dublin Bay South TD she agreed investigating the generation of non-consensual images of adults is more complicated.

Asked if An Garda Síochána, in their conversations with the minister, are exploring proposals to strengthen laws in this area, including Coco’s Law, she said “yes, and I’m aware that’s already under consideration”. The Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Bill, also known as Coco’s Law, was enacted in 2020. It makes the distribution or publication of an intimate image without consent, with intent to cause harm to the victim a serious offence with perpetrators facing up to seven years’ imprisonment.

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Summary

This report covers the latest developments in artificial intelligence. The information presented highlights key changes and updates that are relevant to those following this topic.

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