It is a privilege to speak in this debate, and I thank the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) for securing it. I wanted to apply for it myself—he beat me to the chase, which is a wonderful thing.
Before I became an MP, one of my final clients was in the AI space. It dealt with artificial intelligence and psychology—I believe that my first entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests was my final bit of work for it—so I have seen this technology evolve over many years. We often talk about technology revolutions, but this has been an incredibly fast evolution.
We are seeing Moore’s law, which related to the size and scale of technology, affect society. The scale of what is happening right now is both inspirationally amazing and terrifying at the same time. It will absolutely shape the job market and the type of jobs that come through over the next few years. It will shape how people interface with their co-workers, with technology, with society and with politicians. It will affect every aspect of our lives.
I am particularly concerned about the use of artificial intelligence for deception. I have long said—not necessarily in the Chamber, so I put it on the record now—that there should be in law something that I would call the Turing clause. It would mean that when technology is used to deceive somebody into believing that they are talking to a real person or engaging with a real business, whether for entertainment or for any other purpose—for instance watching a deepfake, which is perhaps for entertainment purposes—it must be crystal clear to them that they are being deceived.
I will give some examples. I was recently speaking to somebody who works in the entertainment industry, running studios where they record sound, voiceovers and music. They said—I should declare that I do not know the scale of this issue and have not looked into the numbers—that lot of the studios are often being used to record voiceovers for AI companies, so that the AI can learn how to speak like a real person. We all know about fraud and scams in which somebody gets phoned up from a call centre and told, “Your insurance is up,” or by someone pretending to be from the Government. We saw, awfully, during the covid crisis how those horrible people would try to scam people. Doing that requires a number of people in a space.
Now imagine that AI can pretend to be somebody we know—a family member, for instance—and imitate their voice. It could call up and say, “I need some money now, because I am in trouble,” or, “I need some support.” Or it could say, “This is somebody from the Government; your tax affairs are an issue—send your details now.” There are a whole load of things going on in society that we will not know about until it is too late. That is why a Turing clause is absolutely essential, so that we are ahead of the curve on deception, deepfakes and areas where technology will be used to fool.
One incredibly important area in relation to the labour market that is not often talked about is the role of AI in creativity. DALL-E 2 is one of the tools, and there are many others popping up now. They can create artwork and videos almost at the speed of thought—typing in a particular phrase will create amazingly beautiful pictures—but they are pooling those from places where real artists and real musicians, with particular styles, have contributed. That is then presented as AI creativity. That could kill the graphic design industry. It could prevent people who are in the early stages of life as an artist, in both the visual and music worlds, from ever having an opportunity to be successful.
Just recently, Drake and the Weeknd—if I have those artists correct—had a song that was put online. I think that it even went on Spotify, but it was definitely on some streaming services. Everybody thought, “Gosh, this is a fantastic new collaboration.” It was not. It was AI pretending to be both of those artists with a brand new song. Artificial intelligence had created it. It was not until after the fact, and after the song had been streamed hundreds of thousands of times, that the big music companies said, “Hang on—that isn’t real. We need to stop this.” Then it was stopped.
In the case of social media, it took us many years to get to the fantastic Online Safety Bill. I was very fortunate to be on the Draft Online Safety Bill Joint Committee. Its Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), is in the room today, and he did a fabulous job. Getting to that point took 10 or
15 years. We do not have 10 or 15 months to legislate on AI. We probably do not have 10 or 15 weeks, given where we will be in a matter of days, with the new announcements and tools that are coming out.