Product Regulation and Metrology Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Foster of Bath and Baroness Brinton

Committee stage
Monday 25th November 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I am very grateful for the explanation from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, of his amendments on AI and digital products, which are particularly appropriate, given the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, on the first group when we were discussing sandboxes, because of his experience during the passage of the digital medicines Act three or four years ago. A number of noble Lords in this Grand Committee worked on that—I am looking at the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, in particular.

I raise this because one area that concerns me about new products, especially those using AI, is that we do not have the same mechanisms that we have, full of fault though they are, for being able to allow our personal information to be used and to give our consent. I have mentioned before the issue of my dentist. Before you go to see your dentist, you have to go online to fill in a consent form, and at some point mid last year I noticed that there was something about the IT suppliers and it said, “It is assumed you give your consent”—and 10 layers further down they had a completely different set of consents that breached UK GDPR law. Had I not been working on another Bill about digital consent, I would not have looked much further. I have to say that the moment my dental surgery was aware of this, that firm was not just told to change it but was sacked. My problem with AI is that none of that work is visible; it is completely invisible.

My question to the Minister is, in the discussion about sandboxes but also about products that will come under this Bill: will he ensure that our current GDPR laws—and indeed our copyright laws in relation to music—are complied with at all times, so that there would not be any freedom for somebody using AI to develop a product to breach those? I say that in light of the final remark the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, made about consultation. Two sets of Government Ministers have had a very bitter time about patient data and care.data—the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is smiling at me—when the public were not fully informed about what was going on, and in both cases the proposals had to be abandoned.

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, the first amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, Amendment 14, seeks to ensure that the production reliance on software and artificial intelligence are included in the scope of the Bill. Clearly, all our remarks are somewhat irrelevant if the Minister gets up and says, “No, they are not”. However, on the assumption that the Minister is going to say, “Yes, they are”, I draw particular attention, if I may, in supporting all the noble Lord’s amendments, to Amendments 75 to 78, on the issue of labelling. This seems to me to be an opportunity for real joined-up government thinking.

The Minister will be well aware that the Communications and Digital Committee, on which I had the opportunity to serve at the time of this, produced a very detailed report on the development of LLMs, large language models, and AI. In so doing, we particularly raised concern about the way in which these large language models were being trained by scraping tons of data from a variety of sources, then creating products over which they were then able to get intellectual property coverage. In so doing, they had scraped a great deal of data.

Amendment 78 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, in respect of the labelling and so on, requires the Secretary of State to lay

“regulations to ensure no product or content … uses an individual’s image, likeness or personality rights without that individual’s express consent”.

Had I been drafting the amendment, I would have gone much further, because it seems to me that a large amount of other data is scraped—for instance, novels written by authors without their permission. I could go on; it is well worth looking at the Select Committee report.

Does the Minister accept that this is a real opportunity to have joined-up thinking, when the Government finally decide what their position is in relation to the training of LLMs and people being required to get the permission of all data owners before they can bring their product to market? Does he agree that the labelling of such products, when developed, should include specific reference to them having gained the appropriate permission, paid the appropriate fee or got the appropriate licence to make use of the data that was made use of in the training of those AI products?