This photo illustration shows the ChatGPT logo at an office in Washington, DC, on March 15, 2023.
Stefani Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images
Italy has become the first country in the West to ban ChatGPT, the popular artificial intelligence chatbot from U.S. startup OpenAI.
Last week, the Italian Data Protection Watchdog ordered OpenAI to temporarily cease processing Italian users’ data amid a probe into a suspected breach of Europe’s strict privacy regulations.
The regulator, which is also known as Garante, cited a data breach at OpenAI which allowed users to view the titles of conversations other users were having with the chatbot.
There “appears to be no legal basis underpinning the massive collection and processing of personal data in order to ‘train’ the algorithms on which the platform relies,” Garante said in a statement Friday.
Garante also flagged worries over a lack of age restrictions on ChatGPT, and how the chatbot can serve factually incorrect information in its responses.
OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, risks facing a fine of 20 million euros ($21.8 million), or 4% of its global annual revenue, if it doesn’t come up with remedies to the situation in 20 days.
Italy isn’t the only country reckoning with the rapid pace of AI progression and its implications for society. Other governments are coming up with their own rules for AI, which, whether or not they mention generative AI, will undoubtedly touch on it. Generative AI refers to a set of AI technologies that generate new content based on prompts from users. It is more advanced than previous iterations of AI, thanks in no small part to new large language models, which are trained on vast quantities of data.
There have long been calls for AI to face regulation. But the pace at which the technology has progressed is such that it is proving difficult for governments to keep up. Computers can now create realistic art, write entire essays, or even generate lines of code, in a matter of seconds.
“We have got to…
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