Dive Brief:
- A monthslong investigation into ChatGPT maker Open AI indicates the company breached European Union data protection law, Italian data privacy regulator Garante said Monday. Details of the findings have not been disclosed.
- OpenAI has 30 days to dispute the allegations. “We actively work to reduce personal data in training our systems like ChatGPT, which also rejects requests for private or sensitive information about people,” an OpenAI spokesperson said via email. “We plan to continue to work constructively with the Garante.”
- To reach a final decision, the regulators will also take into account the work of the European Data Protection Board’s dedicated task force, which launched in April shortly after Italy’s initial ban on ChatGPT.
Dive Insight:
Regulatory action against a technology provider can have downstream impacts.
"If you are an organization and you are using the product that was created on top of that LLM, potentially, as an organization you will be asked the exact same questions," Forrester Principal Analyst Enza Iannopollo told CIO Dive. There’s precedent to prove regulators will come knocking, according to Iannopollo.
Before Italy turned its attention to OpenAI, regulators investigated AI company Replika, in an inquiry that ended last year with its parent company being ordered to stop processing Italian users' data and a potential fine of up to $21.6 million (20 million euros). In 2020, Replika executives previously said 1 in 5 Replika chatbot responses came from GPT-3.
“The same questions that Italian regulators asked Replika were then asked to OpenAI, so that, in my opinion, is the beginning of this relationship between different companies using some share of the same technology,” Iannopollo said.
For most businesses today, the best-case scenario is to have started crafting generative AI strategies with a clear understanding of liability, according to Iannopolo. But that’s not often the case.
The challenging part for enterprise leaders is the uncertainty surrounding the legal liability they take on when deploying solutions, Iannopolo said.
