Ireland considering hosting global AI summit
The AI Action Summit saw world leaders, tech CEOs and academics gathering to discuss how to safely embrace AI.
The conference highlighted the divisions that exist between the EU and the US when it comes to the regulation of the technology.
The AI Committee will today hear from the Minister of State for Trade Promotion, AI and Digital Transformation Niamh Smyth.
"We look forward to engaging with the Minister about her plans for Ireland's EU Presidency and how Ireland can lead on AI innovation globally," said Cathaoirleach of the Committee Malcolm Byrne.
Ms Smyth will also discuss Ireland's National AI Strategy "AI: Here For Good," which was published in 2021 and updated in November 2024.
The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, and its implementation in Ireland, is also on the agenda.
"The Committee looks forward to discussing the strategy and the EU AI Act in depth and the implementation of stringent conditions on AI systems for this revolutionary technology to work effectively in areas such as biometric identification, decision-making for public and private services and benefits and machinery," Mr Byrne said.
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Irish Times
26 minutes ago
- Irish Times
‘Really scary territory': AI's increasing role in undermining democracy
Since the explosion of generative artificial intelligence over the past two years, the technology has demeaned or defamed opponents and – for the first time, officials and experts said – begun to have an impact on election results. Free and easy to use, AI tools have generated a flood of fake photos and videos of candidates or supporters saying things they did not say or appearing in places they were not – all spread with the relative impunity of anonymity online. The technology has amplified social and partisan divisions and bolstered antigovernment sentiment, especially on the far right, which has surged in recent elections in Germany , Poland and Portugal . In Romania , a Russian influence operation using AI tainted the first round of last year's presidential election, according to government officials. A court there nullified that result , forcing a new vote last month and bringing a new wave of fabrications. It was the first big election in which AI played a decisive role in the outcome. It is unlikely to be the last. READ MORE As the technology improves, officials and experts warn, it is undermining faith in electoral integrity and eroding the political consensus necessary for democratic societies to function. Madalina Botan, a professor at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration in Bucharest, said there was no question that the technology was already 'being used for obviously malevolent purposes' to manipulate voters. 'These mechanics are so sophisticated that they truly managed to get a piece of content to go very viral in a very limited amount of time,' she said. 'What can compete with this?' In the unusually concentrated wave of elections that took place in 2024, AI was used in more than 80 per cent, according to the International Panel on the Information Environment, an independent organisation of scientists based in Switzerland. It documented 215 instances of AI in elections that year, based on government statements, research and news reports. Already this year, AI has played a role in at least nine more big elections, from Canada to Australia. Not all uses were nefarious. In 25 per cent of the cases the panel surveyed, candidates used AI for themselves, relying on it to translate speeches and platforms into local dialects and to identify blocs of voters to reach. At the same time, however, dozens of deepfakes – photographs or videos that recreate real people – used AI to clone voices of candidates or news broadcasts. According to the International Panel on the Information Environment's survey, AI was characterised as having a harmful role in 69 per cent of the cases. There were numerous malign examples in last year's US presidential election, prompting public warnings by officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI. Under Trump, the agencies have dismantled the teams that led those efforts. 'In 2024, the potential benefits of these technologies were largely eclipsed by their harmful misuse,' said Inga Kristina Trauthig, a professor at Florida International University, who led the international panel's survey. The most intensive deceptive uses of AI have come from autocratic countries seeking to interfere in elections outside their borders, including Russia, China and Iran. The technology has allowed them to amplify support for candidates more pliant to their world view – or simply to discredit the idea of democratic governance itself as an inferior political system. One Russian campaign tried to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment before last month's presidential election in Poland, where many Ukrainian refugees have relocated. It created fake videos that suggested the Ukrainians were planning attacks to disrupt the voting. In previous elections, foreign efforts were cumbersome and costly. They relied on workers in troll farms to generate accounts and content on social media, often using stilted language and cultural malapropisms. With AI, these efforts can be done at a speed and on a scale that were unimaginable when broadcast media and newspapers were the main sources of political news. Saman Nazari, a researcher with the Alliance 4 Europe, an organisation that studies digital threats to democracies, said this year's elections in Germany and Poland showed for the first time how effective the technology had become for foreign campaigns as well as domestic political parties. 'AI will have a significant impact on democracy going forward,' he said. Advances in commercially available tools such as Midjourney's image maker and Google's new AI audio-video generator, Veo, have made it even harder to distinguish fabrications from reality – especially at a swiping glance. Grok, the AI chatbot and image generator developed by Elon Musk, will readily reproduce images of popular figures, including politicians. These tools have made it harder for governments, companies and researchers to identify and trace increasingly sophisticated campaigns. Before AI, 'you had to pick between scale or quality – quality coming from human troll farms, essentially, and scale coming from bots that could give you that but were low quality,' said Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. 'Now you can have both, and that's really scary territory to be in.' The big social media platforms, including Facebook, X, YouTube and TikTok, have policies governing the misuse of AI and have taken action in several cases that involved elections. At the same time, they are operated by companies with a vested interest in anything that keeps users scrolling, according to researchers who say the platforms should do more to restrict misleading or harmful content. In India's election, for example, little of the AI content on Meta's platform was marked with disclaimers, as required by the company, according to the study by the Center for Media Engagement. Meta did not respond to a request for comment. It goes beyond just fake content. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame found last year that inauthentic accounts generated by AI tools could readily evade detection on eight big social media platforms: LinkedIn, Mastodon, Reddit, TikTok, X and Meta's three platforms: Facebook, Instagram and Threads. The companies leading the wave of generative AI products also have policies against manipulative uses. In 2024, OpenAI disrupted five influence operations aimed at voters in Rwanda, the United States, India, Ghana and the European Union during its parliamentary election, according to the company's reports. This month, the company disclosed that it had detected a Russian influence operation that used ChatGPT during Germany's election in February. In one instance, the operation created a bot account on X that amassed 27,000 followers and posted content in support of the far-right party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD. The party, once viewed as fringe, surged into second place, doubling the number of its seats in parliament. [ 'Somehow the atmosphere in the streets today is worse': Irish in Germany react to election success of far-right AfD Opens in new window ] (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.) The most disruptive case occurred in Romania's presidential election late last year. In the first round of voting in November, a little-known far-right candidate, Calin Georgescu, surged to the lead with the help of a covert Russian operation that, among other things, co-ordinated an inauthentic campaign on TikTok. Critics, including the American vice-president, JD Vance, and Musk, denounced the court's subsequent nullification of the vote itself as undemocratic. 'If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousands of dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country,' Vance said in February, 'then it wasn't very strong to begin with.' The court ordered a new election last month. Georgescu, facing a criminal investigation, was barred from running again, clearing the way for another nationalist candidate, George Simion. A similar torrent of manipulated content appeared, including the fake video that made Trump appear to criticise the country's current leaders, according to researchers from the Bulgarian-Romanian Observatory of Digital Media. Nicusor Dan, the centrist mayor of Bucharest, prevailed in a second round of voting on May 18th. The European Union has opened an investigation into whether TikTok did enough to restrict the torrent of manipulative activity and disinformation on the platform. It is also investigating the platform's role in election campaigns in Ireland and Croatia. [ TikTok could face fines over political ads during local and European elections Opens in new window ] In statements, TikTok has claimed that it moved quickly to take down posts that violated its policies. In two weeks before the second round of voting in Romania, it said, it removed more than 7,300 posts, including ones generated by AI but not identified as such. It declined to comment beyond those statements. Lucas Hansen, a founder of CivAI, a non-profit that studies the abilities and dangers of artificial intelligence, said he was concerned about more than just the potential for deepfakes to fool voters. AI, he warned, is so muddling the public debate that people are becoming disillusioned. 'The pollution of the information ecosystem is going to be one of the most difficult things to overcome,' he said. 'And I'm not really sure there's much of a way back from that.' – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
Irish Examiner
4 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
When it comes to climate action, politicians can't see the wolves from the trees
What have experts ever done for us? 'I think the people of this country have had enough of experts,' British Conservative MP Michael Gove famously said during the Brexit debate, as he dismissed concerns about the potential downside impacts of leaving the EU. But Gove and a lot of people thought they knew better. Well, it seems many may have buyer's remorse or 'Bregret' over the decision. Since late July 2022, the share of people who regret Brexit in surveys has consistently been above 50%. As of May 2025, 56% of people in Great Britain believed it was wrong to leave the European Union, compared with 32% who thought it was the right decision. Just when we thought things could not get any worse, the American electorate and Donald Trump said 'Hold my beer'. Even the most pessimistic person could not have been ready for the vengeful gutting of scientific and educational standards, contempt for the law and disdain for facts and the truth during the second Trump term. But like most right-wingers, Trump seems to hold a special contempt for the environment and any person or body protecting the environment. He has launched more attacks on the environment in 100 days than his entire first term — hitting protections for land, oceans, forests, wildlife and climate. But lest we get complacent and superior over on this side of the water, it looks like those in charge in Europe and Ireland are just as willing to ignore experts and academics when it suits them, and particularly when it comes to the environment. Recently, the European Parliament voted to lower the protection status of wolves under the Habitats Directive — with no sound scientific basis. This proposal was a politically motivated U-turn away from science-based conservation. Ireland's own experts in the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) advised against supporting it, as the wolf remains in an unfavourable conservation status in six out of seven biogeographical regions in Europe. A data-driven reassessment of the species conservation status is due later this year, and the NPWS concluded any change to the species protected status before then was premature. Fine Gael MEP Regina Doherty was quoted as saying: 'A high wolf population can be a threat to biodiversity conservation, farmers, rural communities and tourism.' In fact, wolves play a crucial role in maintaining healthy ecosystems and biodiversity by regulating prey populations, which can lead to a more balanced and diverse ecosystem, the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 being just one example. As for the threat to farmers and rural communities, it seems MEPs could have appraised themselves of some studies before they made their decision. Wolf predation represents a very small fraction of total livestock losses, according to nature strategist Kriton Arsenis. In a LinkedIn post, he referenced a peer-reviewed study from Poland which found grey wolves avoid eating farm animals — even when thousands roam unprotected. In an area where more than 4,000 cattle and 700 horses graze freely each year, scientists found over a two-year period: Only three cattle calves were consumed by wolves; No horse attacks were recorded; Livestock made up just 3% of the wolf diet — and even that was likely scavenged — meaning wolves fed on animals that were already dead; Instead, wolves fed mainly on wild prey — roe deer and wild boar made up over 80% of their diet. And then there's the effect on tourism — but not in the way that Ms Doherty thinks. Nature and wildlife tourism is a growing market. Wildlife tourism centred around wolves is growing across Europe, with organisers highlighting its value for both conservation and rural revitalisation. And it's more profitable than killing wolves. There are already areas with wolves that make 10 times more money organising sightseeing tours than for shooting them, according to the Wilderness Society. Forestry minister Michael Healy-Rae's suggestion to allow forestry on peatlands 'about the dumbest thing we can do'. Many people may not care about wolves. But if we allow these laws to unravel without any evidence or expertise taken into account, what's next. And we in Ireland are not immune from ignoring or threatening to ignore expert and scientific advice, particularly in relation to the environment. 'About the dumbest thing we can do' from the point of view of climate action were the words of Peter Thorne, a professor of climate change at Maynooth University in response to forestry minister Michael Healy-Rae's suggestion to allow forestry on peatlands, which would be a reversal of Government policy, which prohibits afforestation on deep peat. The Irish Peatland Conservation Council warned such actions would have severe environmental consequences and undermine Ireland's commitments to biodiversity and climate action. Peatlands are one of Ireland's most valuable ecosystems, serving as critical carbon sinks, supporting unique biodiversity, and regulating water quality. Scientific research has repeatedly shown afforestation on peatlands disrupts their natural hydrology, accelerates carbon release, and damages habitats essential for rare and endangered species. Of course, the minister's suggestion is cloaked in a faux argument that if you don't plant forestry in bogs, the only other option is to import them: a Sophie's Choice of tree planting. You should always be wary when you're offered a binary choice to a complex problem. More recently, concerns have been raised over Government plans which will lower protections for rivers and lakes by labelling them 'heavily modified water bodies'. Sustainable Water Network chief executive Sinéad O'Brien said the Government's plan to lower protections for one in 10 of our rivers, lakes, and coastal waters, without evidence or proper explanation, shows disregard for the public. This is all starting to sound familiar. We need experts, academics and scientists to help us make decisions based on the best knowledge, information, evidence and science available. The laws of science and nature do not really care about your political affiliations, party policy or whether you think the world is flat — they just carry on regardless. They can't just be discarded on a whim or because the political wind has changed direction. And you ignore them at your peril, as we're finding out with our changing climate.
RTÉ News
7 hours ago
- RTÉ News
Trump unveils 50% Brazil tariff, criticises Bolsonaro trial
US President Donald Trump announced a 50% tariff targeting Brazil as he blasted the trial of the country's ex-leader, while widening a push to secure more bilateral trade deals with other partners. In a letter addressed to Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Mr Trump criticised the treatment of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro as an "international disgrace". The letter added that the trial "should not be taking place". He also said Washington would launch an investigation into Brazil's trade practices. The latest tariff threat came after Brazil said it had summoned the US charge d'affaires in a diplomatic row over Mr Trump's earlier criticism of the coup trial of Mr Bolsonaro. Mr Bolsonaro denies he was involved in an attempt to wrest power back from Lula in an alleged coup plot prosecutors say failed only for a lack of military backing. The 50% US tariff on Brazilian goods will take effect 1 August, Mr Trump said in his letter, mirroring a deadline that dozens of other economies face. While Mr Trump has started to issue letters to trading partners this week as he ramps up pressure towards more deals, he has focused on partners with which his country runs significant deficits. Brazil had not been among those threatened with these higher duties previously. The United States runs a goods trade surplus instead with Brazil. Escalation threats Mr Trump's message to Mr Lula was the latest in more than 20 such letters the US president has released since Monday, setting out tariff rates as Washington tries to bring about more trade pacts. On Wednesday, Mr Trump had addressed letters to leaders of the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Brunei, Algeria, Libya, Iraq and Moldova, spelling out duties ranging from 20% to 30% that would also take effect on 1 August. Similar to a first batch of documents published Monday, the levels were not too far from those originally threatened in April, although some partners received notably lower rates this time. While Mr Trump in April imposed a 10% levy on almost all trading partners, he unveiled - and then withheld - higher rates for dozens of economies. The deadline for those steeper levels to take effect was meant to be Wednesday, before Mr Trump postponed it further to 1 August. Countries that faced the threats of elevated duties began receiving letters spelling out US tariff rates on their products. In the messages, Mr Trump justified his tariffs as a response to trade ties that he says are "far from reciprocal". The letters urged countries to manufacture products in the United States to avoid duties, while threatening further escalation if leaders retaliated. Other countries that have received Mr Trump's letters include key US allies Japan and South Korea, as well as Indonesia, Bangladesh and Thailand. EU deal in 'coming days'? Analysts have noted that Asian countries have been a key target so far. But all eyes are on the state of negotiations with major partners who have yet to receive such letters, including the European Union. The Trump administration is under pressure to unveil more trade pacts. So far, Washington has only reached agreements with Britain and Vietnam, alongside a deal to temporarily lower tit-for-tat levies with China. Mr Trump on Tuesday said that his government was "probably two days off" from sending the EU a letter with an updated tariff rate for the bloc. An EU spokesman said the bloc wants to strike a deal with the United States "in the coming days," and has shown readiness to reach an agreement in principle. Apart from tariffs targeting goods from different countries, Mr Trump has rolled out sector-specific duties on steel, aluminum and autos since returning to the White House in January. Yesterday, Mr Trump said levies were incoming on copper and pharmaceuticals. The planned rate for copper is 50%, he added, while pharmaceutical products face a levy as high as 200% but manufacturers would be given time to relocate operations to the United States.
