Italian authorities and OpenAI have announced that access to the ChatGPT chatbot has been reinstated after the company “addressed or clarified” concerns raised by Italy’s data protection authority, Al Jazeera reported.
After the Data Protection Authority of Italy, also known as Garante, temporarily banned ChatGPT and opened an investigation into the artificial intelligence program’s alleged violation of privacy laws, OpenAI removed ChatGPT from the Italian market last month. The Italian Data Protection Authority described its action as provisional “until ChatGPT respects privacy”, as per Al Jazeera.
The watchdog added that OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, lacked a legal justification for “the mass collection and storage of personal data for the purpose of ‘training’ the algorithms underlying the operation of the platform”.
It also made mention of a data breach that occurred on March 20 and was attributed by the American company to a glitch. User conversations and payment information were exposed, Al Jazeera reported.
Chatbots are computer programmes that process and recreate discussions with users that are human-like using a massive quantity of online data.
ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer and was introduced in November 2022 as a prototype, is powered by a machine-learning model that mimics the functioning of the human brain.