Artificial Intelligence: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-28 ============================================================ Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel I thank the Minister of State for coming in. I really appreciate her passion about this area and especially online safety, but for a lot of us and much of the public watching, there is no faith in the Government's ability - I am not talking about the Minister of State specifically - to address these issues. We have been told it is difficult to regulate, that these things are unexpected and that we are in this position of catching up, but when we have legislation in place relating to non-consensual sharing of intimate images and we still cannot manage to hold X criminally responsible for the development and distribution of child sexual abuse material in flagrant breach of domestic legislation, it is really hard to have faith the Government is going to be able credibly deal with all the other challenges in the AI space, of which this is just one piece. Nothing has been done in light of the Grok scandal. The Minister of State has had lots of meetings but with a simple VPN, those images can still be created in Ireland. I find it extraordinary that we are not holding these companies legally responsible when they have broken our laws, especially when we think about all the money they are making off us. X has made money out of the production and distribution of child sexual abuse material. Social media companies make money off us every day. With every single advertising click, they profit off all our outrage their algorithms generate and the harm happening in our communities. Their entire business model has been to exploit users’ data and make money. Then they can say “Oopsies, sorry, we’re bad” when they have produced a bot, programmed it and made it available on their platform. Under the Digital Services Act, there is the ability for Coimisiún na Mean to seek a judicial order to block access to X and the Government must put in place necessary steps to call for an all-out ban on X operating in Ireland if it does not immediately cease offering the facility to produce these deepfake images of women and children. We all know the danger goes beyond any one platform. AI chatbots have encouraged people to take their own lives, such as in the high-profile and devastating case of Adam Raine, whose parents have begun a lawsuit against OpenAI. In Adam’s case, the AI chatbot effectively pushed him over the edge. Rather than encouraging him to seek support, it isolated him and called him brave for considering taking his own life. The use of AI chatbots can lead to emotional manipulation of the most vulnerable users, who can be adults as well as young people. The line between human and machine has been utterly blurred. What is worse is these chatbots are increasingly embedded in social media platforms such that people do not even know who they are speaking to - especially young people. A report from an online safety group, Internet Matters, found that one third of children feel as though speaking to AI is like speaking to a friend. Given the case of Adam Raine and many others, that should put chills down all our spines. Yesterday we heard from CyberSafeKids in the audiovisual room. The representatives spoke about the rise of AI girlfriends and how easy it is for young people to access them. An AI girlfriend is programmed to be pliant and subservient, which contributes to harmful gender norms. She will flirt with you, she will chat and she will send nudes and sexually explicit videos. That is accessible to anyone who goes online. The harm this is doing to children and young people as well as vulnerable adults is completely immeasurable. We have sleepwalked into a crisis that looms large in every home and classroom. It is a crisis of online sexual abuse and harmful gender norms being reinforced by AI. Without strong regulatory enforcement and critical digital literary skills being embedded in the curriculum, we risk a generation of young people being irreparably harmed. We have all talked about the benefits like climate disaster mitigation and forecasting and enhanced diagnosis in the healthcare space but if we do not properly regulate AI, we are in for a horrifying future. The Minister of State mentioned the digital omnibus but it is going to bring a dilution of data protection rights. It is going to weaken oversight of AI. AI systems will be able to process personal data with fewer safeguards and it may even lead to increased levels of digital surveillance of us as a public, and a reduction of the GDPR guidelines. Big tech has been heavily lobbying on this omnibus and I urge the Minister of State to look at this in detail. She said it is not deregulation but that is not how digital rights experts see it. It is a roll-back of hard-won digital rights protections. I would love to sit down with the Minister of State because we have already sleepwalked into a crisis and if we do not oppose this omnibus proposal, we are going to see a much worse future when it comes to AI regulation across Europe. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-01-28/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:33+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-28