To be fair, Italy didn’t actually ban ChatGPT. They said to OpenAI “Your service does not respect the minimum requirements for the EU privacy law, please change things to be compliant or interrupt the service”. They chose to interrupt the service.
If I had to venture a malicious interpretation, I’d say they chose to quit the service hoping in a massive backslash from the public along the lines of “who cares about privacy, this thing is too powerful not to use”. But every laywer will confirm you that the Italian authority is totally right from a by-the-book interpretation of the privacy law, and I don’t expect the public backslash to be so strong to force Italy to rewrite their laws to allow ChatGPT as-is.
Anyway, since the EU privacy law (GDPR) is basically the same across all the EU, I would expect similar bans quite soon in other countires.
I think that GDPR in cases of blatant noncompliance requires the site to just be blocked until the rules are respected; that said, OpenAI’s response certainly has a lot of “nuh-huh, it’s MY TOY and if you don’t like me I’M TAKING IT HOME WITH ME” energy. They’re probably hoping that backlash from Italian users forces the hand of the watchdog.
Some of the problems may be fixed simply by the ChatGPT website doing the minimal required effort for compliance (they don’t even have a typical “your data will be stored” opt out banner, FFS! Am I to believe they use no cookies? Yeah). But if they go deep into the “how do I delete my personal data if it’s been used in training the model?” question, and the answer is “well, we don’t really know per se… it might be somewhere in there… but then again, it might not...”, that’s pretty much a deal breaker.
Honestly, if these sort of legal challenges forced the tech itself to evolve in a direction where it’s more modular and interpretable so that you can guarantee it won’t break the law, that would be fantastic; it’s exactly the kind of thing we need to be done, and “tons of lawyer fees and lost customers” are a strong economic incentive to do it. That said, right now OpenAI’s API is still available in Italy, no problem. Only the ChatGPT website itself is down.
How about coordinate legal actions to have chatbots banned, like ChatGPT was banned in Italy? Is it possible?
If successful this would weaken the incentive for devealopment of new AI models.
To be fair, Italy didn’t actually ban ChatGPT. They said to OpenAI “Your service does not respect the minimum requirements for the EU privacy law, please change things to be compliant or interrupt the service”. They chose to interrupt the service.
If I had to venture a malicious interpretation, I’d say they chose to quit the service hoping in a massive backslash from the public along the lines of “who cares about privacy, this thing is too powerful not to use”. But every laywer will confirm you that the Italian authority is totally right from a by-the-book interpretation of the privacy law, and I don’t expect the public backslash to be so strong to force Italy to rewrite their laws to allow ChatGPT as-is.
Anyway, since the EU privacy law (GDPR) is basically the same across all the EU, I would expect similar bans quite soon in other countires.
I think that GDPR in cases of blatant noncompliance requires the site to just be blocked until the rules are respected; that said, OpenAI’s response certainly has a lot of “nuh-huh, it’s MY TOY and if you don’t like me I’M TAKING IT HOME WITH ME” energy. They’re probably hoping that backlash from Italian users forces the hand of the watchdog.
Some of the problems may be fixed simply by the ChatGPT website doing the minimal required effort for compliance (they don’t even have a typical “your data will be stored” opt out banner, FFS! Am I to believe they use no cookies? Yeah). But if they go deep into the “how do I delete my personal data if it’s been used in training the model?” question, and the answer is “well, we don’t really know per se… it might be somewhere in there… but then again, it might not...”, that’s pretty much a deal breaker.
Honestly, if these sort of legal challenges forced the tech itself to evolve in a direction where it’s more modular and interpretable so that you can guarantee it won’t break the law, that would be fantastic; it’s exactly the kind of thing we need to be done, and “tons of lawyer fees and lost customers” are a strong economic incentive to do it. That said, right now OpenAI’s API is still available in Italy, no problem. Only the ChatGPT website itself is down.