The Italian data protection watchdog Garante recently declared that the popular chatbot ChatGPT has been scraping people’s data without their knowledge or permission. The move could potentially lead to a total ban on the chatbot in the European Union.
The data protection agency has given ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, until April 30th to comply with the legal requirements to continue operating the chatbot. The company must ensure that teenagers cannot access the chatbot, publish an information notice detailing how it scrapes and processes data, and also provide sufficient proof that the chatbot has a “legitimate interest” for processing data. OpenAI will also be expected to carry out local awareness campaigns so users are aware of how their data is being used and are able to make corrections and delete it if needed. If OpenAI does not respond by the 30th, it will have to pay a fine of up to 20 million euros or four percent of their annual revenue.
The ramifications of this data privacy scandal have been seen beyond the European Union, with the Senate of Brazil considering measures to protect citizens’ rights when interacting with AI systems. In Germany, the Federal Commission for Data Protection and Freedom of Information has expressed concern about data security and may even pass its own restrictions for ChatGPT. Other countries have been seeking guidance from Italy on the rationale for its ban of the chatbot
OpenAI, is an artificial intelligence research laboratory owned by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, whom are dedicated to “discover and enact the path to safe artificial general intelligence.” OpenAI is further supported financially by many well-known technologists, enterprise firms and investors such as Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Amazon Web Services, with the purpose of researching human-level artificial intelligence (AI). The company is however being held to the highest standards of data privacy and protection laws as it relates to their ChatGPT chatbot.
The individual of interest in this article, Willis Eschenbach, is a climate scientist who expressed “fun with ChatGPT” by instructing the chatbot to write a short laudatory speech about his work. He is the founder of the blog “Site for the Presentement of the Climate” and has published in a wide range of journals, including early claims about climate change in the late 1970s. He is also one of the first scientists to suggest that changes in the sun’s energy output can have significant effects on climates on Earth. He has long been a critic of the mainstream climate modelling, and emphasizes the importance of natural cycles.
