Germany is joining other European countries in examining the use of personal data by the famous AI Chatbot ChatGPT created by US-based OpenAI. Data Protection Authorities across Germany have sent a questionnaire to OpenAI and they expect a response by June 11, said Marit Hansen, Commissioner for the northern State of Schleswig-Holstein.
The officials want to know if there is a data protection impact assessment conducted and if the data protection risks are properly managed. The authority also wanted to know if people whose data is used by ChatGPT are sufficiently aware that they have rights such as access, correction and deletion of data.
The European Union has developed a taskforce to harmonize Europe’s data protection regulations and also to help countries address any privacy concerns.
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot which is trained on large datasets and it is able to generate texts, conversations and poems from brief prompts. However, there has been raised concerns that ChatGPT could lead to cheating in schools, trigger the spread of false information on the internet and replace human workers. This has led countries such as Italy to temporarily ban the program in April and the regulatory profiles of France and Spain have also opened their own investigations related to OpenAI’s data processing of ChatGPT.
OpenAI is a research laboratory owned by Microsoft and AI Investor, Elon Musk. It focuses on developing Artificial Intelligence based solutions, through which they research and develop technologies which simulate human intelligence and work towards creating an AI-powered future. OpenAI has earlier released models such as GTP-3, a text-generation model, and several other models which are used in the creative industry, gaming, medical and even advertising industries.
