Italy’s data protection authority was hopeful on Tuesday that the chatbot, ChatGPT, would soon make its return to the country, having been temporarily shut down at the end of March over data privacy concerns. Head of the Data protection authority, Pasquale Stanzione, shared his optimism, stating that if OpenAI (the US firm that makes ChatGPT) was willing to take “useful steps”, the chatbot could be easily accessible as soon as April 30.
ChatGPT gained worldwide recognition for its ability to generate essays, songs, exams, and news articles from brief prompts. Despite being incredibly popular, there were concerns from some regarding where ChatGPT received data from and how it processed it. In response, the Italian data protection watchdog blocked access to the bot due to inappropriate data collection and the risk of wrong answers being able to be provided. Stanzione made sure to clarify that ages of users must be verified, a process of reducing the risk of wrong answers must be introduced, and users must be made aware of their data being used.
OpenAI’s success in ChatGPT lead to a multi-billion dollar deal with Microsoft, as they began to use the technology in their Bing Search engine, along with other programs. This caused a stir in the tech industry, with Google quickly releasing their own chatbot while venture capitalists were similarly throwing money around at new AI projects.
OpenAI is a company founded in December 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever. It is based in San Francisco, California and focus on researching artificial intelligence for the betterment of humanity. Aside from ChatGPT, OpenAI’s other works include GPT-3 which was released in 2020 as a language system and also researches safety and wellbeing involving AI technology.
Pasquale Salzione is a professor in the Faculty of Engineering at University of Bari and head of Digital Section in the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies. Stanzione had previously held a collective award from the Apollo 11 spacecraft project and is also a key membor of the Italian Minister of Innovation’s Scientific Committee. Additionally, Stanzione is the CEO of the artificial intelligence and robotics centre in Rome.
