An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business
Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-20
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Rónán Mullen (IND), National University of Ireland

I join my colleague Senator Joe Conway in paying tribute to the late John Quinn and extend my condolences to John's family. The documentary "Ballyfin - A Boarding School Memory" was very well received more than 30 years ago. John will be missed by a friend of mine, namely Helen Murphy of Port Road in Killarney, who corresponded with him regularly.
I also take the opportunity to recall Mary White, a former Senator who has departed this life.
Mary served in the Seanad and myself and Senator Martin Conway had the pleasure of serving alongside her. I am sure we will be paying tribute to her in due course but I want to extend my condolences to her husband, Padraic, her daughter, Cliona, and her friends and family.
The so-called nudification controversy about generative online chatbots, nonconsenual deepfakes and sexualised images, including those of children, deserves an immediate response from us as legislators. Down the road we will have an EU AI Act although it will not be fully effective until the autumn. That may help but what can we do now? I propose two things, the first of which is an emergency solution banning AI online chatbots from producing nude images. It is a partial solution. It is not comprehensive but it would curb overt explicit output by enforcing stricter safeguards like prompt filters or output scanners that would detect and block nudity. Of course there will be problems and it may prevent some innovation. Enforcement, of course, will rely on AI self-policing but we can talk ourselves out of any solution if we wish. The question is how serious we are about this. An immediate, short-term solution will sharpen the wits of big tech and make them come up, more quickly, with better solutions. They created the problem and they must solve it if they want AI chatbots to survive.
The second, almost immediately applicable, solution is mandatory watermarking of AI outputs whereby providers of generative AI systems automatically embed an identifiable watermark into every piece of content that AI creates. In short, if something is created, it should be capable of being traced back to its creator. I do not know the degree to which the EU AI Act will mandate this but it is a necessary requirement on all AI graphic output and is implementable. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. This remedy, like many others, is prone to manipulation by big brother and therefore free speech advocates must help to ensure that any legislation controlling its use is appropriately tempered. Finally, I would say in the spirit of Carthago delenda est that sooner or later if we are going to get to grips with the problem facing our society, pornography must be brought online. We must not stop saying that just because it seems like a long-term goal.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-01-20/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:31+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-20