ChatGPT has taken over the artificial intelligence (AI) market and its capabilities in answering all manner of questions promptly has led to the application being banned by Italy which has led the country’s deputy prime minister to call the ban too extreme for an emerging technology.
ChatGPT ban is too extreme says Matteo Salvini, deputy Prime Minister of Italy who doubles up as Infrastructure Minister.
On April 2, Salvini condemned the country’s Data Protection Authority (a data agency) for their excessive act of temporarily placing a ban on the chatbot that continues to help millions of people in their individual and professional lives.
ChatGPT was taken offline in Italy on the last day of March 2023
ChatGPT poses a serious threat to the privacy of many Italians, according to the Data Protection Authority. This is the reason why OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research laboratory backed by Microsoft took the application offline in Italy on March 31.
The national data agency cited concerns over OpenAI’s failure to verify the age of users (at least 13 years) as it had demanded.
Using his Instagram handle, Salvini said that the actions of the agency are hypocritical since privacy issues far and wide transcend ChatGPT and extend to all services performed online.
ChatGPT ban in Italy first by a western country
ChatGPT has helped millions of people find answers to their homework and assignments, write music, translate languages, extract data from texts, grade essays, solve mathematic questions, get ideas for AI art, decoration and party themes as well as write and debug code since its launch in November 2022.
Despite being used to appeal a £60 fine by a student in the United Kingdom and helping a student at Cambridge University to research his dissertation, Italy has risen to become the first country in the West to place a ban on the AI-powered chatbot.
With the latest act, Italy has joined Russia, China, North Korea, Afghanistan, the Central African Republic (CAR), Cuba, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Iran among others as countries which have banned OpenAI’s product.
With no specific timeline given by the Data Protection Authority, it is unclear when this “temporary limitation” will end.
Latest regulation on AI-powered products such as ChatGPT
According to Forbes Australia which cited news from Le Parisien, a French daily newspaper, the European Union (EU) aside from preparing the Markets-In Crypto Assets (MiCA) legislation to regulate the crypto industry is also developing the Artificial Intelligence Act.
This legislation will define which AI products will have the most consequences for society. This will clear the misogynistic biases associated with artificial generative intelligence (AGI) software and algorithms such as ChatGPT.
On March 9, the Chamber of Commerce in the United States called for AI technology to be regulated. The Chamber believes that regulation will help grow the emerging sector which has been projected to add about $13 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
More importantly, the agency reiterated that legislation will reduce all national security risks a lot of naysayers have associated with the growth of this privacy-induced sector.
Although Italy’s ban has brought a negative aura around ChatGPT, the application sees 25 million daily visitors, and the number of users jumped from 100 million in January to more than in February and March.
ChatGPT is present in more than 150 countries including the United States, South Africa, Spain, India, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France.
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