I do not know how to express in parliamentary terms the depth of my disappointment, so I will leave that. Whoever helped the noble Viscount draft his response should be ashamed. We do not have a comprehensive system and the police do not have the capability; they came to me after months of trying to get the Home Office to act, so that is an untruth: the police do not have the capability.
I remind the noble Viscount that in previous debates his response on the bigger picture of AI has been to wait and see, but this is a here and now problem. As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, set out, this would give purpose and reason—and here it is in front of us; we can act.
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I also take exception to the idea that it is catching legitimate players. The amendment says
“trained on or trained to”.
There is a bigger question about some of the image makers and about why the Government have not acted more quickly to make sure that safeguards in the bigger models are mandatory, because some are and some are not and, once out in the world, it is very difficult to engineer backwards. I welcome the comments of the noble Baroness about a broader look at this coming from her side of the House.
I have looked at this with the police. The Government have refused to look at the material. Everybody is a potential victim and I cannot tell you what is happening to some of our actors—mainly our actresses—in this arena. It is catastrophic. We cannot wait and see or suggest that the police have the capability and that there is a comprehensive plan. The noble Viscount went into detail about CSAM; I accepted in opening that that is absolutely covered. We are talking about the models trained on or trained to, which, while we have been speaking, have made thousands of child sexual abuse images. I promise to return to this and beg leave to withdraw.