Baroness Berger (Lab)

My Lords, I support Amendments 479 and 480, which seek to prevent chatbots producing illegal content. I also support the other amendments in this group. AI chatbots are already producing harmful, manipulative and often racist content. They have no age protections and no warnings or information about the sources being used to generate the replies. Nor is there a requirement to ensure that AI does not produce illegal content. We know that chatbots draw their information from a wide range of sources that are often unreliable and open to manipulation, including blogs, open-edit sites such as Wikipedia, and messaging boards, and as a result they often produce significant misinformation and disinformation. I will focus on one particular area. As we have heard in the contributions so far, we know that some platforms generate racist content. Looking specifically at antisemitism, we can see Holocaust denial, praise of Hitler and deeply damaging inaccuracies about Jewish history. We see Grok, the X platform, generating numerous antisemitic comments, denying the scale of the Holocaust, praising Adolf Hitler and, as recently as a couple of months ago, using Jewish-sounding surnames in the context of hate speech. Impressionable children and young people, who may not know how to check the validity of the information they are presented with, can so easily be manipulated when exposed to such content. This is particularly concerning when we know that children as young as three are using some of these technologies. We have already heard about how chatbots in particular are designed in this emotionally manipulative way, in order to boost engagement. As we have heard—it is important to reiterate it—they are sycophantic, affirming and built to actively flatter. If you want your AI chatbot or platform not to flatter you, you have to specifically go to the personalisation page, as I have done, and be very clear that you want responses that focus on substance over praise, and that it should skip compliments. Otherwise, these platforms are designed to act completely the other way. If a person acted like this in some circumstances, we would call it emotional abuse. These design choices mean that young people—teens and children—can become overly trusting and, as we have heard in the cases outlined, reliant on these bots. In the most devastating cases, we know that this focus on flattery has led to people such as Sophie Rottenberg and 16 year-old Adam Raine in America taking their own lives on the advice of these AI platforms. Assisting suicide is illegal, and we need to ensure that this illegality extends to chatbots.