Government needs to confirm ‘today’ AI legislation strong enough – Green Party

By Bairbre Holmes, Press Association

The Green Party leader has said the Minister for Justice needs to confirm “today” if he feels existing legislation is strong enough to tackle the issue of AI-generated child sexual abuse images.

Speaking to reporters at Leinster House on Tuesday, Roderic O’Gorman said “we have a crisis situation right now in terms of the degeneration of child sexual abuse imagery online” and the issue “has to be addressed”.

He had been asked about material reportedly produced by the AI chatbot Grok, which is a tool on the social media platform X, owned by billionaire Elon Musk.

Mr O’Gorman said: “I think we’ve become a bit numbed to what’s happening in the online space, and particularly on X, but we are talking about the generation of child sexual abuse imagery, one of the most heinous crimes that we recognise as a society.

“I think the Government needs to examine right now if it has the criminal law tools to deal with, what I certainly believe is, a criminal law offence.

“And if they’re not satisfied they need to take action, and swiftly.”

He said the UK is taking “very serious actions” to tackle the issue and Ireland “can’t allow” itself to “be helpless”.

The British media watchdog Ofcom has launched an investigation into whether X has breached UK law.

UK technology secretary Liz Kendall said generating sexual images without consent will become illegal this week, using an Act passed by the British Parliament last year.

The EU’s AI act was due to be brought to cabinet today, but Mr O’Gorman said it’s “not enough” to rely on existing EU legislation because “advances in technology in this sphere are so quick”.