Following Italy, the privacy watchdogs in France, Germany and Ireland are now also looking at ChatGPT’s operations with increasing scepticism. The Italian regulator has already introduced a ban on the chat program. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, would store large amounts of personal data outside the law and fail to check the age of users, the Italian watchdog said.
Although OpenAi temporarily took the chat program offline in Italy to check whether they were indeed acting in violation of privacy laws, the situation has attracted the attention of regulators elsewhere in Europe. From France and Ireland, contact was sought with the Italian watchdog for consultation. And the German newspaper Handelsblatt reports that a ban is also being considered in Germany.
Launched at the end of last year, ChatGPT is versatile and can answer questions, create summaries and write poems. The program does this on the basis of a huge amount of data collected (online).
Now that users are experimenting with and using ChatGPT’s services on a large scale, the potential drawbacks of doing so are under a magnifying glass. Sometimes chatbots like ChatGPT blurt out blatant nonsense and even make racist comments or passionately praise Russian President Putin. Other times, on the contrary, the answers are surprisingly accurate, which leads to concerns among educators who fear that students will make their school assignments with them. Artists also expressed criticism after they saw that their works were being analyzed and copied.
By the way, a ban by the regulator does not always find support in the government of a country. Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini recently called the decision “overdone” and fears that Italy will miss the competitive battle with other European countries as a result. In Germany, a government spokesman said a ban will not be necessary.
Tech giants like Google and Amazon are failing to lay off workers on a large scale in Europe, as they did in the United States in recent months. This is reported by Bloomberg. Google fired 12 thousand people worldwide, Amazon 27 thousand. Employees are relatively well protected here, although it is also uncertain for them whether they still have work in the long term.