Emily Darlington

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. I thank the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) for securing this important debate. It would be remiss of me, as the MP for Milton Keynes Central, not to acknowledge the opportunities of AI. One in three jobs in Milton Keynes is in tech, often in the edge technologies or edge AIs that are driving the economic growth we want. However, we will not see take-up across businesses unless we have the safest AI, so we must listen to the British Standards Institution, which is located in Milton Keynes and is working on standards for some of these things. Nevertheless, I have many concerns. The Molly Rose Foundation has raised many issues around AI chatbots, not all of which are included in current legislation. It has documented how Alexa instructed a 10-year-old to touch a live electrical wire, and how Snapchat’s My AI told a 13-year-old how to lose their virginity to a 31-year-old—luckily, it was an adult posing as a 13-year-old. We have seen other examples involving suicide, and Hitler having the answers to climate change, and research has found that many children are unable to realise that chatbots are not human. AI algorithms also shadow ban women and women’s health, as others have mentioned. The tech is there to make AI safe, but there is little incentive for companies to do so at the moment. The Online Safety Act goes some way, but not far enough. Our priorities must be to tackle the creativity and copyright issues; deepfakes and the damage they do, in particular, to young girls and women; and the misinformation and disinformation that is being spread and amplified by algorithms because it keeps people online longer, making companies money. We must also protect democracy, children, minorities and women. How do we do that? I hope the Minister is listening. For me, it is about regulation and standards—standards are just as important as regulation—and transparency. The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee has called for transparency on AI algorithms and AI chatbots, but we have yet to see real transparency. We must also have more diversity in tech—I welcome the Secretary of State’s initiatives on that—and, finally, given the world we are in, we must have a clear strategy for the part that sovereignty in AI plays in our security and our economic future.