AI Safety

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 10th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

As always, Ms Butler, it is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I thank the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) for securing this debate and for his opening speech, which was absolutely superb.

Although there is no doubt that AI is becoming the future—and we are becoming aware of more uses online—there are still dangers associated with it, and we must be aware of them. I want to raise those issues as a way of keeping my constituents in the know.

AI is an advance in technology that, to be truthful, I know very little about. To be honest, technology is over my head in many ways, but my constituents are very aware of it. It is not something that I am personally keen to use, nor do I know much about it, but it is something that my grandchildren need to be familiar as they grow up—they are the ones who are coming through. They need to know the dangers that I can see.

I read an article some time ago that said in 15 to 20 years, over 80% of jobs could be done through AI—well, I wonder when MPs will be AI-ed, so to speak. What will that mean? Will all the manual jobs be done by robots? It is future technology—it is “Star Wars” stuff—but is that the future? It is amazing to see what AI can do, but there are also significant risks that come with it. It is about finding the balance. I always refer to the balance, because in almost everything we do in life a balance has to be sought, found and delivered.

Reports to the Police Service of Northern Ireland back home have been made in cases where scammers have imitated family members using voice cloning, asking for emergency money. There has also been a swarm of realistic texts, phone scripts and AI-generated emails purporting to be the like of the Ulster Bank or His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. In my case, they got the bank wrong—I had not heard of the Danske Bank—but none the less, that was an illustration of what they are doing: pressurising victims into transferring money for security reasons. Even though it is all made up, it sounds realistic and authentic, which is a worry.

I have received some of these scam texts before, and I can honestly say that they appear legitimate. With some of them, one would stop and think, “I’m not sure, but I think that’s going to be okay. It seems okay.” I am grateful to the people who come into my office to ask because they are rightly confused. We are there to help them. Every day we have people—mostly the elderly and vulnerable people—who contact my office needing reassurance that what they have been asked to do is illegal, and therefore they should not do it.

I have concerns about the impact that AI has on schools, specifically for children’s learning. I do not want children to use AI as a way of thinking and to be over-reliant on it for schoolwork and homework. The importance of school is to teach children to be problem solvers and to think for themselves. It is important that they are given the opportunity to do just that. AI is a tool that can support learning, but it must never overtake what our teachers are qualified to tell us.