Artificial Intelligence (Regulation) Bill [HL]

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, for the meeting he arranged to explain his Bill in detail and to answer some of the more naive questions from some Members of this House. Having gone through the Bill, I cannot see how we can ignore the importance of this, going forwards. I am also grateful to my noble friend Lady Kidron for the meeting that she established, which I think educated many of us on the realities of AI.

I want to focus on the use of AI in medicine because that is my field. The New England Journal of Medicine has just launched NEJM AI as a new journal to collate what is happening. AI use is becoming widespread but across the NHS tends to be small-scale. People hope that AI will streamline administrative tasks which are burdensome, improve communication with patients and do even simple things such as making out-patient appointments more suitable for people and arranging transport better.

For any innovations to be used, however, the infrastructure needs to be set up. I was struck yesterday at a meeting on emergency medicine where the consultant explained that it now takes longer to enter patient details in the computer system than it used to using old-fashioned pen and paper—the reason being that the computer terminals are not in the room where the consultation is happening so it takes people away.

A lot of people in medicine are tremendously enthusiastic—we see the benefits in diagnostics for images of cells and X-rays and so on—but there has to be reliability. Patients and people in the general population are buying different apps to diagnose things such as skin cancers, but the reliability of these apps is unproven. What we need is the use of AI to improve diagnostic accuracy. Currently, post-mortems show about a 5% error in what is written on the death certificate; in other words, at post-mortem, people are found to have died of something different from the disease or condition they were being treated for. So we have to improve diagnostics right across the piece.

But the problem is that we have to put that in a whole system. The information that goes in to train and teach these diagnostic systems has to be of very high quality, and we need audit in there to make sure that high quality is maintained. Although we are seeing fantastic advances in images such as mammograms, supporting radiologists, and in rapid diagnosis of strokes and so on, there is a need to ensure quality control in the system, so that it does not go wild on its own, that the input is being monitored and, as things change in the population, that that change is also being detected.

Thinking about this Bill, I reflected on the Covid experience, when the ground-glass appearance on X-rays was noted to be somewhat unique and new in advanced Covid lung disease. We have a fantastic opportunity, if we could use all of that data properly, to follow up people in the long term, to see how many have got clotting problems and how many later go on to develop difficulties or other conditions of which we have been unaware. There could be a fantastic public health benefit if we use the technology properly.

The problem is that, if it is not used properly, it will lose public trust. I noted that, in his speech introducing the Bill, the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, used the word “trust” very often. It seems that a light-touch regulator that goes across many domains and areas is what we will need. It will protect copyright, protect the intellectual property rights of the people who are developing systems, keep those investments in the UK and foster innovation in the UK. Unless we do that, and unless we develop trust across the board, we will fail in our developments in the longer term. The real world that we live in today has to be safe, and the world that AI takes us into has to be safe.

I finish with a phrase that I have often heard resonate in my ears:

“Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback”.


We must not let AI be the horses that take all the trust in the developments away.