OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) giant, is facing its biggest regulatory challenge yet. Italian authorities have declared that OpenAI must comply with local and European data protection and privacy laws by April 30 or face a blanket ban on its product range, a tall order for experts who suggest it may be next to impossible.
The Italian authorities’ order was a reaction to a data breach occurring in ChatGPT and GPT API that allowed customers to see the data of other users. A translation of the order via Bing reiterated that little information was provided to those whose data was being collected and that there was no legal basis for the mass collection and processing of the data to ‘train’ the system on the platform. Furthermore, OpenAI must consult age verification to guarantee compliance with their terms requiring users to be 13 or above.
In terms of gaining compliance in the European Union, OpenAI must offer a reason for its sweeping data collection practices. GDPR states that users must give their informed consent for the use of their personal data, as well as offer them the ability to opt out should they wish to. The problem here is that the machine OpenAI uses tends to amalgamate multiple data points and it may be beyond the ability of OpenAI’s technicians to remove or modify individual data.
Margaret Mitchell, an AI ethics expert, stated that OpenAI will find it impossible to identify and remove individual data. Similarly, Lilian Edwards, an internet law professor at Newcastle University, suggested that this dispute could result in the case making its way to the court of justice of the European Union, and suggested that OpenAI might be unable to operate its ChatGPT products after the April 30 deadline if it cannot identify and remove individual data upon request.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning research laboratory that was founded in late 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, among various investors, with the aim of securing artificial general intelligence solely for beneficial purposes. Since then, OpenAI has gone on to become one of the world’s leading AI companies, with significant milestones such as beating human players at the Dota 2 game, the development of a text-generating AI that could write like humans, and the development of the OpenAI Gym, an open source toolset for Reinforcement Learning.
