Italy has become the first Western country to ban ChatGPT, the popular artificial intelligence chatbot from U.S. startup OpenAI.
Last week, the Italian Data Protection Watchdog had imposed a temporary but immediate restriction on ChatGPT owner OpenAI to stop them from processing the data of Italian users. Watchdog is also planning to launch an investigation into whether the chatbot breaches the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
OpenAI said that they have temporarily disabled ChatGPT and it complied with GDPR.
The regulator, which is also known as Garante, cited a data breach at OpenAI that allowed users to view the titles of conversations other users were having with the chatbot.
Garante also flagged issues over a lack of age restrictions on ChatGPT, and how the chatbot can serve factually incorrect information in its responses.
There “appears to be no legal basis underpinning the massive collection and processing of personal data in order to ‘train’ the algorithms on which the platform relies,” Garante said in a statement.
The Italian data protection authority said OpenAI had 20 days to say how it would address the watchdog’s concerns, under penalty of a fine of €20 million ($21.7m) or up to 4% of annual revenues.
