Italy has ordered the blocking “with immediate effect” of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool, ChatGPTof the American technological Open AIaccusing her of not respecting the user data protection law. In a releasehe Italian Guarantor for the Protection of Personal Data (GPDP) ensures that it has opened an investigation and that, in the meantime, “the block will be maintained until it is clarified whether or not ChatGPT complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)the pioneering European privacy law».
In the writing, the Privacy Guarantor points “the lack of information to users and all interested parties whose data is collected by OpenAI»but above all “the absence of a legal basis that justifies the massive collection and storage of personal data, in order to train the algorithms underlying the operation of the platform”. “As evidenced by the verifications carried out, the information provided by ChatGPT does not always correspond to the actual datathus determining inaccurate processing of personal data”asserts.
The Italian agency also accuses ChatGPT of not checking the age of your users. A priori, children under 13 years of age could not use this conversational system, but the Guarantor suspects that this limitation could be a dead letter.
Open AIwhich does not have an office in the European Union (EU), however, has appointed a representative in the European Economic Area, has a period of up to 20 days to announce what measures it will take to comply with the request of the Italian authorities. Not respecting European law you could be fined up to €20 million or up to 4% of global annual turnover. On March 20, a data breach was reported that affected the conversations of ChatGPT users and the information about the payments of subscribers to the service, the regulator asserted.
ChatGPT It is the best known among the relational AI platforms that are capable of emulating and elaborating human conversations. Its launch on November 30 has triggered a wave of impacts. Microsoft has embraced that technology and integrated it into most of its services, from your Bing search engine to office applications like Word or Excel. There is no doubt that ChatGPT has become the fashionable tool. Searches for this word, according to semrush, have already accumulated 2.1 million searches since its launch. However, it must be taken into account that ChatGPT is still in the development process and all the information that we are going to take from it must be reviewed.
In fact, last week, the European Consumer Organization (BEUC) it also urged EU and national authorities to investigate ChatGPT and similar chatbots, given “the risk to users of harm from unregulated technology.” “Despite all the benefits that AI can bring to our society, we are currently not sufficiently protected against the harm it can cause to people,” he said in a statement. release ursula pachl, deputy director general of the BEUC.
The European organization revealed that although the EU is currently working on the world’s first legislation on AI, its concern is that “years go by” before that law can take effect: “This could leave consumers at risk of harm by a technology that is not sufficiently regulated during this interim period and for which consumers are not prepared”.