Italy bans ChatGPT as tech world calls for AI moratorium

Italy has temporarily banned AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT over data and privacy concerns as global tech industry leaders call for an urgent halt to AI development.

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot released in November and hailed by the World Economic Forum as “the start of the generative AI boom.” Users can chat with ChatGPT, which is programmed to generate automatic responses based on a machine-learning algorithm. The Microsoft-backed program has been confirmed to strongly promote globalist agendas, which includes creating a fake study to try to claim there are more than two genders.

The Meloni administration ordered Thursday that both ChatGPT and its creator, San Francisco-based firm Open AI, be prohibited from processing data from users in Italy. The Guarantor for the Protection of Personal Data (GPDP) cited several concerns, including ChatGPT’s lack of age verification tools to block inappropriate answers for children.

“[A]ccording to the terms published by OpenAI, the service is aimed at people over the age of 13. The Authority points out that the absence of any filter for verifying the age of users exposes minors to absolutely unsuitable answers compared to their degree of development and self-awareness,” said the GPDP in a Friday press release.

Another concern the administration cited is that the program uses a machine-learning algorithm which uses user data to enhance its language model. But ChatGPT has no legal basis to collect such data from users, says the GPDP.

“[There is] no way for ChatGPT to continue processing data in breach of privacy laws,” the agency said. “The Italian [Supervisory Authority] imposed an immediate temporary limitation on the processing of Italian users’ data by OpenAI, the US-based company developing and managing the platform. An inquiry into the facts of the case was initiated as well.”

“[N]o information is provided to users, nor to interested parties whose data was collected by OpenAI, LLC and processed through the ChatGPT service,” the GPDP order stated, also noting “the absence of a suitable legal basis in relation to the collection of personal data and their treatment for the purpose of training the algorithms underlying the functioning of ChatGPT.”

Last week, tech industry leaders signed an open letter calling for a moratorium on the development of AI systems, which they said is “out of control” and “dangerous”.

The letter, whose signatories include Elon Musk and Apple co-Founder Steve Wozniak, notes the concern that “recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”

“Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” the letter asks.

“Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.”

AI expert Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has spent decades researching artificial intelligence and founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), responded to the letter Wednesday by urging tech industry captains to “shut it all down” and end AI development permanently.

“Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow,” Yudkowsky wrote in a Time article Wednesday. “A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.

“If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly compared ChatGPT to the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, which he said was a "project on the scale of OpenAI – the level of ambition we aspire to." According to the New York Times, Altman is “certainly determined to see how it all plays out” and, as his mentor says: “He likes power.”