Maria Miller MP said, “AI will revolutionise the jobs market, education, and communications in the next 5 years; and this important conference by staff and students at QMC helps ensure young people in Basingstoke are starting to think about how this impacts them, as well as the moral dilemmas they will need to navigate. I was grateful for the opportunity to hear young people’s views and to contribute my experience to the discussion.”
The conference at QMC looked at ‘Will Artificial Intelligence Make Us Happy?’, ninety students at Queen Mary’s College listened to guest speakers and discussed the many opportunities that AI will have for our communities as well as the obvious pitfalls.
Maria went on to say, “Deep fake, is a particularly heinous aspect of AI, where artificial intelligence can be used to create abusive or misleading fake images. For example, I have called for the banning of ‘Nudification’ software which uses AI to enable the user to take any image of a woman to create a fake image depicting them nude. I will continue to press for this change. Thankfully, following a near-decade long campaign, the Government has acted to introduce new laws that make it a crime to share deep fake nude images or any other intimate images online without the consent of the person being depicted. This will help better protect many hundreds of victims of intimate image abuse each year. These changes have been brought forward as part of the online safety bill currently being debated in the House of Lords.
“The majority of deepfake images are pornographic, and 98% of those pornographic images are of women. These new laws are essential to help stop a damaging blight that disproportionately targets women, particularly using social media to spread these images to many millions of people in a way that makes it very difficult to remove completely.
The students and staff arranged for the AI program Chat GBT to also take part in the discussion to demonstrates its’ scope.It was asked a number of questions during the debate, including whether AI could perpetuate inequalities in society and to what extend should AI feature in politics.
Maria added, “The use of AI, particularly in medicine, is already a reality and overwhelmingly a force for good in helping detect illness and disease. Inevitably there are also malign influences that will look for ways to use AI for the detriment of society as well. Our laws must keep pace with technological changes to help ensure these threats are as controlled as possible. This debate demonstrated the innate distrust of AI there is across the age groups. AI is here to stay and through debates like this the threats and opportunities can be discussed rationally based and managed for the good of society."