Is Italy leading the fight against artificial intelligence? The country announced on Friday that it was blocking chatbot ChatGPT over data usage concerns, two months after banning Replika, another program marketed as a “virtual friend.”
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In a press release, the Italian Personal Data Protection Authority warns that its decision has “immediate effect” and accuses ChatGPT of not respecting European regulations and of not having a system to verify the age of minor users.
This decision will result in “the temporary limitation of the processing of Italian user data vis-à-vis OpenAI”, the company behind the application, she adds.
ChatGPT appeared in November and was quickly taken over by users impressed with its ability to clearly answer difficult questions, write sonnets or write computer code.
Funded by the computer giant Microsoft, which has added it to several of its services, it is sometimes presented as a potential competitor to the Google search engine.
The Italian Authority underlines in its press release that ChatGPT “suffered on March 20 a loss of data concerning the conversations of the users and the information relating to the payment of the subscribers to the paid service”.
She also criticizes him for “the absence of an information note for users, whose data is collected by OpenAI, but above all the absence of a legal basis justifying the collection and mass storage of personal data, in the purpose of +training+ the algorithms that make the platform work”.
Furthermore, while the robot is intended for people over the age of 13, “the Authority emphasizes that the absence of any filter to verify the age of users exposes minors to absolutely no answers. commensurate with their level of development.
The same institution had blocked the Replika application in early February, which offers chatting with a custom avatar. Some users had complained of receiving too daring messages and images, close to sexual harassment.
This time, the Authority asks OpenAI to “communicate within 20 days the measures taken” to remedy this situation, “under penalty of a penalty of up to 20 million euros or up to 4% of the annual worldwide turnover”, the maximum provided for by the European Regulation on personal data (GDPR).
This case shows that the GDPR, which has already resulted in billions of dollars in fines for tech giants, could also become the enemy of new content-generating AIs.
The European Union is also preparing a bill to regulate artificial intelligence, which could be finalized at the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024, for application a few years later.
Because AI feeds much deeper fears than the mere exploitation of personal data.
European police agency Europol warned on Monday that criminals are ready to take advantage of artificial intelligence like the ChatGPT chatbot to commit fraud and other cybercrimes.
From phishing to misinformation or malware, the ever-evolving capabilities of chatbots are likely to be quickly exploited by malicious people, Europol said in a report.
They can also be used to cheat in exams and ChatGPT had been blocked soon after its release in several schools or universities around the world. Large companies have also advised their employees not to use the application, for fear of leaking sensitive data.
Finally, billionaire Elon Musk, one of the founders of OpenAI whose board he later left, and hundreds of global experts on Wednesday signed a call for a six-month pause in intelligence research. more powerful than GPT-4, the latest version of the software on which ChatGPT is based, launched in mid-March, citing “major risks for humanity”.