TECH NEWS – Italian privacy regulators have given OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, barely three weeks to take action.

The Italian government has banned ChatGPT because it does not have a system to verify the age of the user, and its collection and processing of the user data violate the country’s data protection laws. Italy’s data protection authority, holding the figurative banhammer, claims that ChatGPT users are not informed about the collection and processing of their data and that the information provided by the AI “does not always match factual circumstances.” The problem with age is that although OpenAI only allows use by people over 13, there is no age verification function.

The authority highlighted a data breach on March 20, which affected users’ dialogue and subscribers’ payment information. OpenAI acknowledged it on March 24, taking the system offline because of a bug in the open-source library that allowed it to show the chat history of another active user. Italy is the first Western country to ban ChatGPT. Apart from them, authoritarian countries (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) have decided to do so. The Italians mostly cite the same reasons, but it should be added that on the political scale, a coalition of parties spanning the right and far right is in power.

Several individuals with expertise in AI, including Elon Musk, have recently published an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the training of AI models more powerful than GPT-4, but others are taking more concrete steps. New York’s education department announced in January that it was blocking access on school networks and devices, Getty Images banned the uploading and sale of AI-generated images, and the European Consumer Organisation is also investigating ChatGPT. Ireland’s data protection commission told the BBC that they would contact the Italian authorities for more information, so it is possible that they, too, will take action against the technology.

Who will be next?

Source: PCGamer