Controversy Continues – Canada Probes OpenAI

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is now being questioned by Canada’s federal privacy watchdog. The AI-powered chatbot has been subjected to investigation for its alleged attempt to collect, use, and disclose personal information without consent. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is conducting the investigation. According to the commissioner, Philippe Dufresne, its effects on privacy are a priority subject. Thus, they will prefer to keep up and stay ahead of the agile technology advances.

The commissioner points it as one of the primary focus areas of his job. OpenAI’s human competitive intelligence-powered ChatGPT hit the market in November last year.

What Fueled the Concern

ChatGPT became explosively popular among netizens because of its ability to generate human-like lyrics, essays, news articles, and whatnot. While these seemingly incredible software abilities have won over the hearts of thousands, critics have always been suspicious about the software. They have never been sure from where GPT collects data and how it processes them.

This bot leverages the vast pool of information available online to generate detailed and systematic answers to the users’ queries.

This questionable attribute of the software fueled a lot of controversies and questions, seemingly taking the software to the commissioner’s table for a probing. The alleged software, ChatGPT, has been enjoying strong economic backing from the tech giant Microsoft. In fact, MS has added the tool to many of its services. Some have also touted the software as the future competitor of Google.

The tool was previously powered by the GPT 3.5 language model. Later, the developers upgraded the model to GPT4. While gathering text from the internet, the tool is likely to ingest personal information – at least experts and critics believe so. This is what concerns the officials, and they are not ready to overlook the fact that the older GPT3 model used to spit out people’s phone numbers.

The Global Response on GPT’s Reliability

Different initiatives have already been taken by several countries and organizations to prevent GPT’s alleged tendency to access unauthorized/unconsented data. A few days back, Italy announced that the country has started investigating ChatGPT to determine if the software is involved in unethical data collection.

Furthermore, the Italian government is also analyzing the software to determine its safety for usage by minors. In fact, the country has implemented a temporary ban on the product.

Germany, Ireland, and France have also started observing GPT’s activities to figure out if the software violates GDPR rules.

The e-commerce giant, Amazon, has suggested their workers prevent themselves from sharing confidential information like proprietary codes, phone numbers, etc., with ChatGPT. The authoritative body of Amazon is concerned that ChatGPT will most likely leak data when using its open-source library. It’s being said that the software may reveal snippets of users’ conversations and payment data.

The bot has also stated that OpenAI may come up with a public statement about the investigation. Alternatively, they may prefer to keep the matter private until the investigation is over. Besides data-related concerns, ChatGPT and its competitors have also been questioned for plagiarism. Italy’s privacy watchdog suspects this generative AI model of breaching European data rules.

The 27 nations listed in the European Union have proposed to negotiate a law that would classify AI programs and tools depending on their level of risk. The risks and opportunities of AI are going to be discussed in a meeting between the US president, Joe Biden, and the Council of Science and Technology advisors.