Ireland’s data protection commissioner warned on Thursday that Generative AI, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, must be controlled.
He added that regulators must first figure out how to do so effectively before rushing into bans that “really aren’t going to stand up,”
“It needs to be regulated and it’s about figuring out how to regulate it properly,” Helen Dixon, Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, said at a Bloomberg conference, adding that the argument had spanned thousands of ChatGPT analogues.
“For the Irish data protection commission, where we are at is trying to understand a little bit more about the technology, about the large language models, about where the training data is sourced.”
Following Italy’s unilateral decision to temporarily prohibit the chatbot, which is fast rising in popularity, the body that combines Europe’s national privacy watchdogs last week established a task group on ChatGPT.
On Tuesday, Italy’s watchdog said it is willing to approve the reintroduction of ChatGPT by the end of April if its maker OpenAI takes “useful steps” to resolve the agency’s concerns.
While the Irish DPC is the EU’s principal regulator for many of the world’s greatest technological companies because their EU headquarters are in Ireland, it does not have the same authority over OpenAI, which has no offices in the EU.
Dixon went on to say that the difficulties surrounding Generative AI go far beyond data privacy and involve copyright.
