The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) recently published the first progress report from its “GPT taskforce,” delivering troubling news for OpenAI’s ChatGPT. According to the report, OpenAI’s efforts to align ChatGPT with European Union regulations, including the stringent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), have fallen short.
Insufficient Measures for Compliance
Despite efforts by OpenAI to ensure compliance, the EDPB found these measures inadequate. The EDPB noted:
“Although the measures taken in order to comply with the transparency principle are beneficial to avoid misinterpretation of the output of ChatGPT, they are not sufficient to comply.”
Persistent Data Privacy Issues
OpenAI has faced multiple temporary stop orders from several EU member states throughout 2024. Italy’s data protection agency previously found that ChatGPT was still violating Italian and EU data privacy laws despite being warned and subsequently banned in March 2023.
The EDPB’s report highlighted that OpenAI has not made significant progress in rectifying these issues. The main concern is ChatGPT’s propensity to generate inaccurate information. The EDPB stated:
“As a matter of fact, due to the probabilistic nature of the system, the current training approach leads to a model which may also produce biased or made-up outputs.”
The report further expressed concerns that “the outputs provided by ChatGPT are likely to be taken as factually accurate by end users,” regardless of their actual accuracy.
Technical Challenges and Compliance
It remains unclear how OpenAI can bring ChatGPT into compliance with GDPR standards. The GPT-4 model, for instance, contains billions of data points and around a trillion parameters, making it impractical for humans to verify the dataset’s accuracy comprehensively. However, the EDPB explicitly stated:
“In particular, technical impossibility cannot be invoked to justify non-compliance with these requirements.”
The ongoing assessment and pressure from the EDPB indicate that OpenAI will need to find innovative solutions to address these compliance issues. This situation underscores the broader challenge of ensuring that advanced AI models like ChatGPT can meet stringent data protection and privacy standards.
As OpenAI navigates these regulatory hurdles, the outcome will likely set precedents for the broader AI industry, influencing how AI technologies are developed and regulated in the future.
