The European Data Protection Board (EDPB), a body made up of national privacy watchdogs in Europe, announced on Thursday the creation of a task force devoted to ChatGPT (standing for Conversation-based Graphical Processing Technology). ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) program that has gained significant traction in the past few months due to its real-time repsonses to a wide range of queries.
Due to its immense popularity and potential threat to safety, privacy and jobs, the need for regulation and policies to be set in regards to the use of ChatGPT has become apparent. This notion was further reinforced with the unilateral action from Italy of curbing the use of ChatGPT last month. Germany’s commissioner for data protection has commented on the potential for similar action in Europe’s largest economy.
The task force established by the EDPB focuses on the enforcement action taken by the Italian data protection authority against OpenAI regarding its ChatGPT service. The task force will also foster cooperation between data protection authorities in exchanges of information, policy and aligning of certain positions.
OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft Corp., is the owner of ChatGPT. It was noted that the members in the EDPB MEETING included policy experts that discussed opinions and exchanged ideas, rather than making an official decision.
This move by the European Data Protection Board will ensure smoother adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning in Europe as it promotes transparency and safety in the data industry. The focus of the task force is to prevent the misusage of state-of-the-art technology which could potentially harm user safety.
