B

Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 19 May 2025

Debate

Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Contribution

My Lords, it seems that the Government are relying on two arguments to reject the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. The first is that regulating AI is such a big, complex problem that we cannot deal with one bit; we have to deal with it all. The second is that it is so big that it is global, so we cannot do anything local. The noble Lord, Lord Brennan, just demolished the global argument, so I am sure noble Lords are pleased that I am not going to repeat his arguments. I want to demolish the first argument as well, which is that we should wait to do everything in one place on AI. That is for old-world technology, not new, agile technology. If we are going to regulate the digital world, we will need to test and learn. We will need to regulate through things that are necessary, even though we know that they are not sufficient. I have not heard a single argument from the Government in any place suggesting that transparency is not necessary. It is necessary, so this amendment is necessary; it is not sufficient to regulate this extraordinary, groundbreaking technology called AI, but that does not mean we should not regulate now in this way and build on it. I am afraid we will debate AI in this Chamber for decades to come, but that does not mean that we should reject this amendment. Like the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, I hope that the other place and the Government will hear the cross-party support for the work that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has been doing and bring back something listening to what we have to say.

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