The Italian authorities have announced the blocking of the ChatGPT conversational chatbot for not respecting the legislation on personal data and not having a system to verify the age of underage users, according to the Italian data protection authority.
This decision, “with immediate effect«, will result in »the provisional limitation of the processing of Italian users’ data with respect to OpenAI«, creator of ChatGPT, the guarantor said in a statement.
ChatGPT appeared in November and was quickly adopted by users impressed by its ability to clearly answer difficult questions, write sonnets, and even pass exams.
In its statement, the Italian authority stresses that ChatGPT “suffered on March 20 a loss of data on user conversations and information relating to the payment of subscribers to the payment service.”
The watchdog body also reproaches ChatGPT for “the lack of an informative note for users whose data is collected by OpenAI, but above all the absence of a legal basis that justifies the mass collection and conservation of personal data, in order to of ‘training the algorithms that make the platform work’”.
In addition, while the robot is intended for people over 13 years of age, “the authority emphasizes that the absence of any filter to verify the age of users exposes minors to answers that are absolutely not in accordance with their level of development.”
The authority asks OpenAI that “communicate within 20 days the measures adopted” to remedy this situation, “under penalty of a penalty of up to 20 million euros or up to 4% of the annual world turnover.”
This announcement comes after the European police agency Europol warned on Monday that criminals were willing to take advantage of artificial intelligence such as the chatbot ChatGPT to commit fraud and other cybercrime. A group of thousands of experts from different disciplines recently published an open letter calling for a moratorium on the development of new AI solutions that are more advanced than current ones.