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Crime and Policing Bill

My Lords, I too support the amendments in this group, particularly those tabled by my noble friend Lord Nash on security software and by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on AI-generated child sexual abuse material. I declare my interest as a trustee of the Royal Society for Public Health.

As others have noted, the Online Safety Act was a landmark achievement and, in many ways, something to be celebrated, but technology has not stood still—we said it at the time—and nor can our laws. It is important that we revisit it in examining this legislation, because generative AI presents such an egregious risk to our children which was barely imaginable even two years ago when we were discussing that Act. These amendments would ensure that our regulatory architecture keeps pace.

Amendment 266 on AI CSAM risk assessment is crucial. It addresses a simple but profound question: should the provider of a generative AI service be required to assess whether that service could be used to create or facilitate child sexual abuse material? Surely the answer is yes. This is not a theoretical risk, as we have heard in testimony from many noble Lords. We know that AI can generate vivid images, optimised on a dataset scraped from children themselves on the open internet, and that can be prompted to create CSAM-like content. On this, there is no ambiguity at all. We know that chatbots trained on the vast corpora of text from children can be manipulated to generate grooming scripts and sexualised narratives to engage children and make them semi-addicted to those conversations. We know that these tools are increasingly accessible, easy to use and almost impossible to monitor by parents and, it seems, regulators.

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These amendments create a proportionate duty. Providers regulated by the Online Safety Act would report identified risks to Ofcom and agree steps to mitigate them, backed by Ofcom’s enforcement powers. That must the right thing to do.

Amendments 479 and 480, on large language models and chatbots, address a related gap. The Online Safety Act’s user-to-user and search services categories were designed for the pre-generative AI world, despite our efforts to bring it up to speed. They do not neatly capture LLMs used to search interfaces or conversational agents that retrieve and synthesise content in response to user prompts, and we have heard such vivid testimony of what those dangers are to children.

I will bring a public health dimension to this debate since these amendments are consistent with a public health approach. In health systems, we do not wait for harm to manifest itself or show symptoms before we act. We assess risk, implement controls and monitor outcomes; that is the framework in which we apply ourselves. The same logic should apply here. We do not need to wait for an epidemic of AI-generated CSAM before requiring providers to assess and mitigate risk. Prevention is always preferable to cure and in the context of child sexual abuse, in which every image represents a real or simulated violation, prevention is a moral imperative, and there enough biomarkers already in the digital world for us to know that there is a severe risk.

I hope very much indeed that the Government will look seriously at this group of amendments.