Online Safety Bill

Lord Sarfraz Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sarfraz (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as an investor, adviser and entrepreneur in the technology industry, as set out in the register. I welcome the Bill, although it is big, complicated and difficult to understand. However, there is a real risk that we are regulating the past instead of thinking about the imminent threats of the future. I will focus on two very narrow issues.

First, as immersive environments—metaverses—become more and more popular, we have the issue of actions in these environments. This is not content, photos, videos and texts but actions. Anyone can buy a haptic glove and touch inappropriately a child in a metaverse. The child would not even know that he or she was being abused. In fact, you can buy a vest with 30 different sensors so that it feels real.

There is a whole community around age play, where adults play the role of children. This is happening right now. There are virtual reality brothels with child avatars. What if that avatar has the likeness of a real child? How much of a likeness is a likeness? What if it has the name of a real child?

This industry, particularly the immersive industry, needs guidance, and it has said that it does. I hope the Minister can elaborate on the guidance that will be provided to it. On this note, I express my support for my noble friend Lord Bethell’s amendment on mandatory age verification. The technology exists and it works. There is no reason why it should not be implemented.

Secondly, the Bill defines user-generated content very clearly, but it is completely silent on machine-generated content. What if an AI chatbot was to groom or abuse a child? Who is responsible: the owner of the dataset on which that AI has been trained or the server on which that data has been transmitted? I thought: why not ask a chatbot? I did. It said, “Yes, an AI bot can abuse a child but liability for abuse by AI bots is a complex issue.” So AI bots are already trying to get out of liability for future abuse. That is what the machines are telling us today.

There are a lot of great things in the Bill and I support it very much, but we cannot always play catch-up with technology. I hope the Minister will tell us how this guidance will be provided as it relates to emerging technologies.