Online Safety Bill

Debate between Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Bishop of Oxford

Report stage
Thursday 6th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I just want to elucidate whether the Minister has any kind of brief on my Amendment 152A. I suspect that he does not; it is not even grouped—it is so recent that it is actually not on today’s groupings list. However, just so people know what will be coming down the track, I thought it would be a good idea at this stage to say that it is very much about exactly the question that the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, was asking. It is about the interaction between a provider environment and a user, with the provider environment being an automated bot—or “tool”, as my noble friend may prefer.

It seems to me that we have an issue here. I absolutely understand what the Minister has done, and I very much support Amendment 153, which makes it clear that user-generated content can include bots. But this is not so much about a human user using a bot or instigating a bot; it is much more about a human user encountering content that is generated in an automated way by a provider, and then the user interacting with that in a metaverse-type environment. Clearly, the Government are apprised of that with regard to Part 5, but there could be a problem as regards Part 3. This is an environment that the provider creates, but it is interacted with by a user as if that environment were another user.

I shall not elaborate or make the speech that I was going to make, because that would be unfair to the Minister, who needs to get his own speaking note on this matter. But I give him due warning that I am going to degroup and raise this later.

[The Lord Bishop of Oxford]

My Lords, I warmly welcome this group of amendments. I am very grateful to the Government for a number of amendments that they are bringing forward at this stage. I want to support this group of amendments, which are clearly all about navigating forward and future-proofing the Bill in the context of the very rapid development of artificial intelligence and other technologies. In responding to this group of amendments, will the Minister say whether he is now content that the Bill is sufficiently future-proofed, given the hugely rapid development of technology, and whether he believes that Ofcom now has sufficient powers to risk assess for the future and respond, supposing that there were further parallel developments in generative AI such as we have seen over the past year?