ChatGPT is drawing attention for all the wrong reasons as Italy’s data regulator has taken aim at OpenAI and its generative text tool. The issue at hand is how OpenAI’s data collection process can be an invasion of privacy as the text generation system acquired personal information from the internet. This resulted in Italy’s Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali issuing a temporary emergency decision demanding OpenAI stop using the personal information of millions of Italians included in its training data.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence company co-founded by American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist Elon Musk. The company’s team of nearly a dozen members is composed of scientists, engineers, and industry professionals with a mission to develop digital intelligence that can help shape a better future for everyone.OpenAI is famous for training its text-generation system known as GPT-3 with millions of pages scraped from the internet and other sources, such as Reddit posts and books.
Tobias Judin is the head of international at Norway’s data protection authority and has expressed the opinion that if OpenAI’s business model involved scraping the internet for whatever one can find, there could be a massive issue with GPT-3 and other similar generative AI models. He believes that OpenAI using peoples’ information without permission raises questions as to whether it is legally permissible to use such tools.
The spotlight is currently on OpenAI as more governmental bodies are getting in on the action. Other data protection authorities in France, Germany, and Ireland have contacted Garante and requested more information on their findings.
The Italian decision serves as a warning to aid developers in the development of generative AI models that, while they can be immensely powerful, they must also take care to be mindful of people’s personal privacy. In addition to the GDPR rules that protect the data of more than 400 million people, OpenAI and companies like it must be aware of their own policies, as an invasion of privacy can have serious liability repercussions.
