Member

On the question of artificial intelligence raised by the noble Lord, Lord Harper, all I can do at this point in the evening is to recap, very briefly, what I have said before in this House. I am not against machine translation or AI in principle, but we have to be really careful about it at the moment. AI training data up to this point means that, although machine translation works very well indeed for the standard Romance languages such as French, Spanish and Italian, and for German, it is much less reliable for languages with many dialects, such as Arabic. At the moment, it is almost useless for tonal languages, such as Mandarin, and for many African languages. Those may well be the languages that are needed in the circumstances that we are talking about today. Let us not rush to rely on it but wait until AI training data has brought it up to standard.