The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as a key issue in the public debate and a factor transforming every dimension of society, is the focus of this session. Although AI offers many opportunities, its increasingly widespread, easy and pervasive use poses many critical risk factors. For this radically transformative technology is changing Human-Tech relations, raising wholly new ethical and legal challenges, affecting people’s rights and freedoms, as well as the role of our political institutions.

The fact remains that AI, and especially generative AI, technologies are bound to open up a very wide-ranging and intense stage of innovation, holding out new possibilities for analysing and processing information. Nevertheless, their malicious use can constitute a threat to political stability and democratic values, especially in cases where these technologies are used to manipulate information and can become a vehicle of foreign interference in the free and informed exercise of the right to vote.

In this regard, the Hiroshima AI Process, launched in May 2023, led to the definition of the first international framework comprising Guiding Principles and a Code of Conduct for Organizations Developing Advanced AI Systems, aimed at promoting the safety, security and reliability of said systems.

The aim of creating an open, interoperable, reliable and secure cyberspace must also be pursued by protecting data (in all three dimensions - its integrity, confidentiality and availability) and digital communication infrastructure, considering that a large part of the life of citizens, businesses and institutions now takes place in the digital dimension.

Parliaments must be capable of encouraging and working to strengthen national and collective security in the multilateral framework by implementing appropriate policies, requiring the players in the field to be transparent, and continuously updating the security tests on the systems as they are released and disseminated.

Parliaments are also making their contribution to the digital transition process, both by acquiring the knowhow needed to better perform their tasks as regulators or controllers and by testing the technologies as they become available, to be able to apply them to the internal procedures involved in parliamentary activities, and to offer new tools to enable citizens to approach the institutions.

Given this scenario, States, and particularly Parliaments, are being called upon to play a crucial twin role: to provide input at the supranational level and in multilateral fora to draw up regulatory frameworks and cooperation policies, by studying the present challenges and needs and anticipating the future ones; to promptly adopt rules for domestic use, but with a global approach, governing AI uses in different fields of application, allowing the benefits of these new tools to be fully utilised, and always at the service of humankind, while ensuring compliance with the agreed principles and values, and ensuring an appropriate level of protection of national rights and interests.