After the wonder of the beginnings, the first safeguards are installed. At least two complaints relating to the use of personal data have been filed in France against the conversational robot ChatGPT, already targeted by various procedures in several countries, we learned this Wednesday from the complainants. These two complaints, revealed by the site L’Informé, were filed Tuesday with the Cnil, the French policeman for personal data.
The first comes from the lawyer Zoé Villain, president of the association for raising awareness of digital issues Janus International. In her complaint, she explains that she created an account on the site of OpenAI, the Californian company behind the software, in order to use ChatGPT and that she noticed the absence of “general conditions of use” to accept and of “any privacy policy”. She therefore asks the Cnil to help her exercise her right of access to her personal information collected by OpenAI, after an unsuccessful attempt made with the company. “We’re not anti-tech, but we want ethical technology,” she said.
A second complaint was filed by David Libeau, a developer very invested in the protection of personal data. He explains in his complaint that he spotted false information about him by questioning ChatGPT on his profile. “When I asked for more information, the algorithm started to fabricate and attribute to me the creation of websites or the organization of online protests, which is totally false,” he explained.
Several countries are taking action
Generative artificial intelligence, a technology used by ChatGPT to generate answers and which is based on gigantic corpora of texts gleaned from the Internet, tends to invent certain facts, by the very admission of its designers. According to David Libeau, this contravenes Article 5 of the European Regulation on Personal Data (GDPR), according to which information on individuals must be accurate, and any processing of data must be fair.
Last Friday, Italy became the first country to temporarily block ChatGPT, due in particular to fears about the security of personal data, the absence of an information note to users, and the absence of a filter to check the age of users. Other European authorities, including those of France, Ireland or Germany have since approached their Italian counterpart to establish a common position on ChatGPT. On Tuesday, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada announced that it was opening an investigation into OpenAI, still about personal information. Generative AI is also the subject of complaints from artists and press photographers who want to be able to accept or refuse that their works be used for model training.