UK watchdog warns chatbot developers over data protection laws
Britain’s data watchdog has issued a warning to tech firms about the use of people’s personal information to develop chatbots after concerns that the underlying technology is trained on large quantities of unfiltered material scraped from the web.
The intervention from the Information Commissioner’s Office came after its Italian counterpart temporarily banned ChatGPT over data privacy concerns.
The ICO said firms developing and using chatbots must respect people’s privacy when building generative artificial intelligence systems. ChatGPT, the best-known example of generative AI, is based on a system called a large language model (LLM) that is “trained” by being fed a vast trove of data culled from the internet.
“There really can be no excuse for getting the privacy implications of generative AI wrong. We’ll be working hard to make sure that organisations get it right,” said Stephen Almond, the ICO’s director of technology and innovation.
In a blogpost, Almond pointed to the Italy decision and a letter signed by academics last week, including Elon Musk and the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, that called for an immediate pause in the creation of “giant AI experiments” for at least six months. The letter said there were concerns that tech firms were creating “ever more powerful digital minds” that no one could “understand, predict, or reliably control”.
Almond said his own conversation with ChatGPT had led to the chatbot telling him generative AI had “the potential to pose risks to data privacy if not used responsibly”. He added: “It doesn’t take too much imagination to see the potential for a company to quickly damage a hard-earned relationship with customers through poor use of generative AI.”
Referring to the LLM training
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