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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-10-14 Daily Xml
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Artificial Intelligence

The Hon. C. BONAROS (15:07): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Attorney a question about AI images and little missing boy Gus.

Leave granted.

The Hon. C. BONAROS: As we would all no doubt be aware, some two weeks ago we learned of little four-year-old Gus going missing from his family homestead about 40 kilometres south of Yunta in the remote part of SA's Mid North. I think it's fair to say that while most South Australians have been holding their breath, hoping and praying that this little boy will be found safe and well, others have taken to social media to spread misinformation and AI-generated depictions of the child. My questions to the Attorney are:

1. Does he share the concerns of tech and legal experts who have expressed concerns about the ease with which harmful and entirely deceitful content is being produced and disseminated, content that, according to the media, preys on public feeling and potentially interferes with the search for this little boy?

2. Does he consider that our recent reforms to these laws are broad enough to capture this sort of behaviour?

3. If not, will the Attorney commit to considering further reforms that will address those very concerns that I have just alluded to that have been raised by legal and tech experts when it comes to this sort of image manipulation?

The Hon. K.J. MAHER (Deputy Premier, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Attorney-General, Minister for Industrial Relations and Public Sector, Special Minister of State) (15:09): I thank the honourable member for her question. I might say from the outset that the reports that I saw of some of the images the honourable member is talking about I utterly condemn and I think we all find completely deplorable. They are images that I think would raise significant concerns and be very, very distressing.

The rise of artificial intelligence is something that, for regulators, poses significant challenges, as this is an exceptionally rapidly moving area of technology. We have in this parliament looked at ways of addressing some elements of this. I note we worked collaboratively with the honourable member and the honourable member worked collaboratively with the government on changes we made in this parliament in relation to humiliating and degrading images, images that it was possible our current laws did not fully cover, being wholly artificially generated, not just manipulated, images.

We changed the law to make sure that the existing criminal law in relation to those sorts of images covered wholly generated images. I am trying to remember the statistics, but I think it was the federal eSafety Commissioner who looked at the creation of deepfakes. Somewhere in the 90 per cents are non-consensual pornographic deepfakes and somewhere in the very high 90 per cents of those are women and girls, so it was an area that absolutely needed us making sure the law covered as broadly as it should.

Just this week, new laws have commenced in South Australia in relation to election campaigns, meaning that those artificially generated deepfake voices or videos can't be used in an election campaign without someone's permission, and when they are created by someone or with their permission, it needs to be clearly identified that that is the case. We have seen in the US and places like India election campaigns run where even people who have passed away are purported to have made statements endorsing or campaigning or condemning things in political campaigns. We have made legislative change in some areas. There absolutely is more to do.

We have released a discussion paper as a government looking at how we treat someone's likeness in terms of their ability to control what is done with their images or voice, whether it should be something that's more akin to copyright, so that you actually have a proprietary right over your image, your likeness, your voice, that someone can't use without your permission.

We have seen regularly on social media, on the internet, people purporting to support various commercial products, financial products, pseudoscience, health remedies, when they have done absolutely no such thing at all and it's artificially generated. It is an area we are looking at. In fact, we take it that seriously that, in government, we have an assistant minister in the South Australian parliament that is dedicated to looking at issues to do with artificial intelligence, particularly how we, as regulators, deal with issues that are thrown up.

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