Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge (Con)

My Lords, I declare an interest as a guest of Google at its AI policy conference, as a member of the advisory board for Arãya Ventures, a venture capital company that invests in AI, and in receiving pro bono legal advice from Mishcon de Reya on image-based sexual abuse. I am grateful to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for tabling this debate and I congratulate her on taking up that historic role and being the first woman to hold it. Artificial intelligence is the defining technology of our time. It has the power to cure disease, accelerate scientific discovery and transform our economy. Yet it also has the power to deceive, manipulate and even take life through autonomous weapons systems. Your Lordships’ House has frequently proposed legislation to regulate and mitigate against its worst impacts and it is vital that we continue this important work, especially in respect of the appalling cases raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, of chatbots coercing children to self-harm and suicide. Therefore, it is right that we consider the impact of AI on humans. But I cannot help but wonder whether we have got the question the wrong way round. Is artificial intelligence not at its core an extension of those who have trained and developed it? Does it not hold up a mirror to where our values have already slipped? Noble Lords will know that I am passionate about preventing people from using AI to create non-consensual sexually explicit images. I firmly believe that the driving force behind that particular application of AI technology is ingrained misogyny within our society, which has utilised AI as a powerful new frontier. These applications were not accidents; the AI models were trained or fine-tuned with a purpose—to violate a woman’s consent. The root cause lies not in the AI technology but in those who trained or fine-tuned it. Therefore, perhaps the question before us should be the impact of humans on artificial intelligence, rather than the other way round. In his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas last week, the Pope warned that those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. I wholly agree that the development of AI should not be left to a handful of individuals in Silicon Valley, but I have deep concerns that by seeking to slow its progress, we simply count ourselves out of the race and cede the power to shape it to those whose values we may not share. In an interview with the Financial Times this week, Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, said: “If it were possible to elegantly slow the development of this technology to give us more time … to deal with this, that would likely be a good thing”. But he acknowledged that slowing down would be immensely difficult given the commercial and geopolitical rivalries with China. We must always keep in mind what this technology can achieve when utilised for the benefit of society. One need only take the example of AlphaFold by Google DeepMind, which has predicted 3D protein structures with an accuracy that would have taken conventional research many years to achieve, ultimately winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for its chief developers. That work is now being utilised by millions of scientists around the world, accelerating the development of treatments for diseases that have long defeated us. We have seen AI used to identify vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure and to give a voice to those who have lost the ability to speak. Whether we like it or not, if we as a country do not embrace this technology, this technology will leave us behind. It is our responsibility to ensure that this Government do everything in their power to make the UK a genuine leader in AI, equipping our society with the skills and adaptability to meet what is coming and ensuring that our laws and values are woven into its development from the start. Without partaking, we will have no power to shape it for better or for worse. Only by being present in this race can we ensure that we do not cede the ability to shape our own future to those whose values we do not share.