Chi Onwurah, chair of the Science, Technology and Innovation Select Committee, has said she is bringing a bill to Parliament to stop companies from developing digital twins of real people.
The Ten-Minute Rule Bill, entitled Personal Data (Digital Twin), will outlaw digital twins of people without the express permission of the individual concerned.
Last February, during an oral evidence session looking at social media, misinformation and harmful content, Onwurah asked Wifredo Fernandez, senior director for government affairs at X (formerly Twitter) about the power of its algorithm.
She said: “We have talked about the blue-tick algorithm. The Committee had a presentation – X made parts of its algorithm public in 2023, I think, and we had a presentation on that. It was quite staggering to see the size of the heterogeneous information network of Twitter, as it then was, which contained one billion nodes and described all the links between users, tweets or posts and adverts.
“There are up to 100 billion connections within that. That algorithm is effectively run five billion times per day. That says to me that X, and I am sure others, are creating a digital twin of each individual on your network to target advertisements and content at them for engagement. If that is the case, you must also have responsibility for the targeting of misinformation through those networks. Would you agree?”
When the Committee asked about the potential harm the algorithms could cause people, Fernadez said: “We understand that every day there are many categories of harm that we have to account for, and that is why we have policies and procedures in place to deal with those harms, based on the risks they pose to our users and their safety every day.”
Digital twins of real people are used to predict behaviour, to target advertising and – in some cases – to groom people to extreme behaviours in ways outside of the control of the individual concerned. Onwurah said that stealth twinning violates the premise that a person should have some control over their likeness, and that it drives the anthropomorphising of artificial intelligence (AI) and the sycophantic nature of chatbots.
In the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee report Social media, misinformation and harmful algorithms last year, the Committee called, among other things, for a right to reset algorithms. Onwurah said this right has not been forthcoming.
The Personal Data (Digital Twin) bill will require platforms to have express permission before turning a person’s preferences into an algorithm, safeguarding the uniqueness of the human person. It includes a principles-based definition of a digital twin which covers any algorithms or models which includes people’s preferences. It is expected that this would also have implications for AI deepfakes and copyright exemptions.
Onwurah said: “AI models are bringing incredible benefits, from cancer diagnosis to weather mapping. However, the stealth-twinning of individuals is already callusing significant harms and that is likely to increase. No one has the right to impersonate you for gain, yet impersonating a person’s preferences to sell to them or groom them is a significant and growing harm. This bill will establish the principle that ‘There is only one me’, for everyone.”
