AI: “Nudify” Apps

Lord Bassam of Brighton Excerpts

Tuesday 13th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

As regards the overall regulation of AI, I hope that noble Lords have had a chance to peruse the Government’s response to the AI White Paper consultation. It makes the argument very clearly that there will come a time when it is right to legislate to create binding rules on all creators of AI. When that time comes, due to the policies that we are putting in place, we will have an agreed risk register informing us. We will have set up monitoring and evaluation techniques, again gathering evidence. We will have working relationships with the AI labs, defined procedures for the creation of AI, and regulators trained to regulate AI within their own sectors. That means that, when we do regulate AI, it will be done in a targeted and sophisticated way, on the basis of evidence.

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government have been far too complacent on this issue. During the passage of the then Online Safety Bill, we warned a number of times that, given that this is a fast-moving technology, as the Minister says, the Government needed to get ahead of the game. Given the proliferation of these ghastly images and the appalling impact this has on people’s lives, does the Minister now agree that neither the emergence of these apps nor their misuse is surprising? If that is the case, why did the Government not broaden the scope of their amendments when they had the opportunity to do so? Will the Minister now look for ways in which we can plug the gaps that are clearly emerging?

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

As the noble Lord said, it is a fast-moving space, and that requires an adaptive, agile response in legislating for it. That is the approach that we are taking. As to the argument that we can now see that it is not working, I am not sure that that is the case. The intimate image abuse offences commenced on 31 January—two weeks ago. I am pleased to see that, yesterday, we had our first cyberflashing conviction under those provisions. Using an evidence base, looking forward, we will have to consider carefully what is working before we go ahead and implement further bans.