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Italy's ChatGPT ban attracts EU privacy regulators

102 points by firstSpeaker 4y ago

hunglee2 4y ago
Here's the thing: the Europeans have a cast iron case. No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise. This is not to endorse the European position - which is foolish, regressive and short sighted - but only to outline the case overly bureaucratised societies make when established protocols encounters innovation.
- hindsightbias 4y ago
  Soylent Green is people. At least the original sources there got a good video show and nice drugs.
- luckylion 4y ago
  > No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise. It's about privacy concerns, not copyright.
  - throwntoday 4y ago
    Governments with heavy social programs can't risk losing anymore taxpayers at a time where their systems are already strained by a lack of workers/population decline. This seems like a preemptive measure to prevent that more than a result of privacy concerns.
    - microtonal 4y ago
      Presuming these ulterior motives gets so tiresome. These bans are instated by data protection authorities, which largely operate independently. E.g., the Dutch data protection authority regularly fines the government. Pretty sure that is the case for other EU countries too.
      - throwntoday 4y ago
        You're welcome to disagree with my presumption but you don't appear to be stating anything definitive about this matter either. All these governments have a duty to their aging population, which also tends to make up the majority of the active voter base. Every action they take tends to be multipronged but at the end of the day it's meant to protect those social programs. Consider mass migration to increase labor force and birth rates. Sure they can claim it was purely out of good will, but you'd have to be pretty myopic not to see the reality there.
        mftrhu 4y ago
        You keep on conflating data protection agencies with governments. They aren't the same thing - the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali is an independent administrative authority - and even the GP pointed that out.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      I assure you, unless it's about multi-billion euro companies, the German state does not care at all whether they'll lose a tax payer or ten or ten thousands (source: me, a tax payer that gets fucked by the bureaucracy at every opportunity). Data Protection is taken extremely seriously and everything that is associated with "big data" is extra suspicious. Throw in "think of the children" for extra spice. I doubt tax income on copyright dividends even registers.
- ribosometronome 4y ago
  Cast iron case for what?
  - deleted 4y ago
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- cguess 4y ago
  The main argument is around GDPR which limits/bans the collection and storage of personal information without consent. They definitely did this, and it's quite clear in the law that it's unacceptable (as it should be). OpenAI is the worst of the SV/SF "if we get big enough before we get caught it won't matter" mentality. Unsurprising given who's behind the company.
  - CSMastermind 4y ago
    What does collection and storage of personal information mean in this case? The model weights? They're integers. There's no personal information stored in the model. The fact that the model can generate someone's personal information is like saying that a person can type someone's personal information into a Word document so we should ban Office 365.
    - mola 4y ago
      All digital data is just bytes...
- basisword 4y ago
  >> This is not to endorse the European position - which is foolish, regressive and short sighted Potentially, but I’m glad somebody is taking a minute to question whether or not a handful of tech companies have the right to consume everyone’s information, build their entire business with it and then sell that back to the people whose data they wouldn’t have existed without in the first place.
  - hunglee2 4y ago
    yes I agree that the query is not a bad thing. However, what I think is a bad thing is if the query ends up with a ban (which I think it will) and prevents the obvious value of this new class of technology for the rest of humanity
  - berkle4455 4y ago
    > have the right to consume everyone’s information, build their entire business with it and then sell that back to the people That’s quite literally what google has done for 25 years, just with advertising for monetization.
    - medvezhenok 4y ago
      Yes, and arguably Google has been way under-regulated for the externalities they caused to the system (one example is having adversarial bidding wars for companies over their own keywords, which is simply a rentier tax on Google advertising) I think we're finally coming around on that (I think a lot of regulators were slow on antitrust in the internet space because the harm to the consumer/environment is not immediately obvious - i.e. it's mostly non-monetary externalities) Same as America as a whole and offshoring to reduce labor cost. The externalities are slow but they're clearly there in the increasing polarization and the growth of the precariat.
    - basisword 4y ago
      It’s not. Indexing and linking to primary sources is very different to consuming all of those primary sources and spitting it back without attribution. Google entered this area a bit with the info boxes they display alongside results but it’s a very different proposition from AI.
- ildon 4y ago
  At least for what Italy is concerned, the issues raised do not seem to be correlated to the training phase, but rather to the actual usage of chatGPT.
  - ildon 4y ago
    Also, based on the combination of the fact that data was made public, article 6, paragraph 1, letter f), and their business, I would argue that their use of personal data scraped on the web for training purposes is legitimate
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise I see the argument. (I'm not sure it's the one Italy made.) Still, it's weird to see GDPR turning into a generic IP bludgeon being cheered on.
- microtonal 4y ago
  No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise. But these bans are not based on potential copyright violation of content that was used to train the original model. The ban is primarily based on GDPR violations, so privacy. The ban in Italy seems to be based on three point: - A data breach occurring on March 20. - Mass collection of private data for training the model (not sure whether this refers to ChatGPT user queries or the original data, which could contain privacy-sensitive data, also see 'right to forget'). - No age verification. See e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65139406 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65139406
- oh_sigh 4y ago
  That's not why they banned it though. If chatGPT was offered as a downloadable model which any user could run on their own machine with no internet access, there would be no basis for the ban.
- FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
  When I read any of your comments, a part of it stays in mind, forever. Does that mean I have to pay you royalties for thinking about it or mentioning it? I don't think so. GPT is like a primitive intelligence that read a large part of the web and got influenced by it, nobody deserves compensation or consultation for the public data it was trained on. If you put something on a public internet page, you should expect that other beings, artificial or not, are going to get influenced by it.
  - qgin 4y ago
    It’s not immoral or unethical to digest information, but the difference is when a computer can do that digesting of information the scale is very different than if a human does it and it blows up the incentives for people to create content in the first place. In the most extreme version, no human writing would be read or seen by other humans, it would be all fuel for the machine intelligence. If that it to be our future, we have to figure out how to rearrange incentives so that humans continue to be motivated to create the content that feeds the machine intelligence or the whole system falls apart.
  - Out_of_Characte 4y ago
    Does that mean I have to pay you royalties for thinking about it or mentioning it? Yes, if HN were to post copyrighted work that only they could spread, then you would be liable. In the same trend, any patents that HN comments share should not be redistributed/sold by you. Chatgpt circumvents copyright law in a way that is hard to detect. How many sentences of moby dick does it take to prove chatgpt is plagiarising other peoples protected works?
    - nradov 4y ago
      That is mostly not how US copyright or patent law works. Your claim just wrong. It is legal to spread limited amounts of copyrighted material under fair use, and anyone can create and sell new content based on copyrighted material as long as it is sufficiently transformative. It's also totally legal to print out a bunch of patents and redistribute those in a book or whatever (except on certain secret patents which aren't relevant here). You can't copyright a patent filing. The only legal restrictions are on building and selling things that infringe on patent claims.
- danielrhodes 4y ago
  I am not a lawyer, but this doesn’t seem strong at all. How is it different than a person reading several books on a subject and giving a speech based on what they’ve learned? Obviously if the speech was repeating verbatim what was read, this would not be acceptable. But that is not the case here. Likewise, should the authors of books a child learns to read with be able to claim copyright over all works and language the child produces afterwards simply because their material formed the basis for that child’s neural network related to reading and writing?
  - mola 4y ago
    Not a lawyer either, but I think it's different because it's not a person...
- calibas 4y ago
  > No consent was given by the content creators I assumed consent was hidden deep in some ToS agreement.
- deleted 4y ago
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  - deleted 4y ago
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- m3kw9 4y ago
  Yeah, just forget llm,gpt and the fancy words for a min, you have a company it reads websites data it deems useful and creates a middle layer API to regurgitate/massage all that work back to you and charging you a fee. OpenAI deserves fee but are they forgetting where the training data came from?
- fithisux 4y ago
  For this they are right.
- gumballindie 4y ago
  > which is foolish, regressive and short sighted Yet americans constantly complain about china not honouring ip protection laws. Why should a company such as openai be allowed to steal content and then reproduce it without royalties?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- thefz 4y ago
  > which is foolish, regressive and short sighted Foolish and regressive because we don't want a foreign corporation to raise almost endless profit off of our data? Keep your products in the US then, nothing of value will be lost if we prevent access to Meta, Twitter and all this bullshit.
Lapsa 4y ago
tbf that's actually my biggest concern too. make it run on an offline personal pocket calculator, please
AdilZtn 4y ago
Regulating but not innovating. Always the same story, always the same result ..
- mellosouls 4y ago
  You're posting that on the web (European innovation)...
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    Yes, the first 0.001% of the technology came from Europe. What have you done for us in this millennium?
    - cguess 4y ago
      Spotify to name one.
      - pb7 4y ago
        Spotify who set up shop in the US at the first indication of viability? Not very promising for the EU when the majority of their employees are in the US.
        cguess 4y ago
        They were in Europe for years before moving to the States. Also Siemens then. The European tech scene isn't as sexy, they tend to make things that are useful, not just things that get VC hype.
      - zmnd 4y ago
        And now compare how many employees they have in the US vs EU.
        neom 4y ago
        Pretty sure they also trade on the NYSE?
hef19898 4y ago
>> tech news outlet Reuters (from the article) Was this articlr writen by ChatGPT itself? It sure reads like it...
- piaste 4y ago
  Worse. It was written by a low-quality content mill that is one step above spam. The Germany 'ban', for example? A German newspaper asked the Federal Commissioner if it could be blocked, and he answered "In principle, it could be", then followed with a bunch of boring nuanced qualifications that nobody wants to read, like the fact that in Germany this would be a state-level decision, or that they have just asked the Italian authorities for more information. https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/nach-vorstoss-in-italien-man-kann-technologie-nicht-mit-verboten-aufhalten-diskussion-um-chatgpt-regulierung-in-deutschland/29075002.html https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/nach-vorsto... A couple of rounds of 'journalist' telephone game later, and it has become "ChatGPT Ban Spreads to Germany". Utter trash.
blibble 4y ago
seems reasonable if there's ANY PII at all in the training set then the weights and any output should be treated as PII too of course the only way to verify that a model doesn't contain PII is to provide the entire training set and the process for turning it into a model and opening up this data would completely destroy any economic benefit that could be gained from exploitation of the model which in turn completely destroys any incentive to create it in the first place what a pity
olivierduval 4y ago
Actually, there's two interesting things: 1. it shows that Europe is starting to act "as a whole" : Italy used RGPD to ban ChatGPT (whatever the motivation) so every counrty in EU has to think about it and ban it too 2. what some people call "regressive legislation" is the legislation that want to stop IA from using any sources to build without paying the content creator for it... And if I remember correctly, nobody is pretending that it's fair
systemvoltage 4y ago
EU’s position will have zero impact on progress of AI, they’ll regress into ever increasing socialist state. If I were a EU citizen, I would fear the disadvantage of being left behind without the most powerful innovation of our times.
gaoshan 4y ago
Right or wrong this is just going to lead to others taking the lead and accelerating away in this technology.
jpalomaki 4y ago
So access to the system is blocked from these countries, but it continues to utilize the problematic data to server customers in other countries? Not sure if this is really the best approach.
dash2 4y ago
Here's my hypothesis of what is going on: 1. Europe can't do computers. This is bad for them, because foreign companies, who can do computers, make money in Europe and beat out the local competition. 2. But the EU has discovered that it can extract money by threatening to ban the foreign companies for reasons of privacy, data protection etc. 3. Since the EU is a valuable market, the companies accept the fines as a price of doing business. 4. Italy is getting in early by firing a shot across the bows of OpenAI, which is not yet a huge moneymaker, but may be in future.
- GalenErso 4y ago
  > Since the EU is a valuable market For how long? A market is large because it has highly productive economies. If Europe can't hack computers, as you say, their growth potential will be curtailed.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Europe can't hack computers, as you say, their growth potential will be curtailed European industry is alive and well, and it can buy the tools it needs from American companies. To the degree "Europe can't hack computers" is less of a ridiculous oversimplification, it's with pertinence to the consumer market.
    - shuckles 4y ago
      Is it really alive and well or is it mostly booking profits for activities conducted elsewhere in the world? How much R&D, manufacturing, or distribution do the ABBs and Siemens of the world actually depend physically on the EU for?
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > How much R&D, manufacturing, or distribution do the ABBs and Siemens of the world actually depend physically on the EU for European heavy industry expertise is deep [1]. It also undergirds a lot of America production; Rheinmetall, for instance, designs and builds the M1 Abrams’ gun. In light industry, ASML is the product of a distributed precision manufacturing culture. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_manufacturing_companies_by_revenue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_man...
inductive_magic 4y ago
As a German with very limited faith in our government, I don't think they'll pull through with this. Our current coalition isn't this deranged; the ratio between potential gains and potential losses just doesn't add up. We're a regressive bunch, but not that regressive. I hope.
- jacooper 4y ago
  It breaks the laws, its openAI's problem not Europe's fault for caring about privacy.
misssocrates 4y ago
Is this the beginning of the Butlerian Jihad?
bigmattystyles 4y ago
Apropos of nothing, I noticed French media pronounces GPT geepeetee instead of what in French should be jaypaytay. Probably because it sounds just like ‘J’ai pété’ which means ‘I farted.’ Since chat is the French word for cat, saying ChatGPT out loud,is basically saying ‘Cat, I farted’.
- nedsma 4y ago
  Hahaha, this is so funny. Thank you for sharing. See also Nvidia culitho and its meaning in Spanish.
  - triggerw4rn 4y ago
    [flagged]
- HeckFeck 4y ago
  Now OpenAI have their new mascot.
- addcommitpush 4y ago
  “Chat” as in “internet discussion” is pronounced the same way in French as in English, as it is an English loan word, and not like “Chat” as in “cat”.
serjester 4y ago
Ethical considerations aside, I'm not sure how a country stays competitive on the global landscape if they refuse to use some form of LLM models over the next 20 years. The productivity gains possible with these relatively early iterations is far too large to ignore. Maybe they'll fund their own versions but their past history doing this hasn't been reassuring [1]. [1] https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/eu-approves-166-million-in-funding-for-google-competitor/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/eu-approves-16...
- blibble 4y ago
  it's perfectly reasonable to assume that some countries may ban or restrict LLMs entirely and place trade sanctions/penalties on goods/services imported from that don't have similar/comparable legal prohibitions (similar to the GDPR and/or plans for carbon producers)
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Adobe Firefly showed you can train generative image models without ignoring the copyright questions posed by this, over the next 20 years someone will figure out how to train an LLM without ignoring the GDPR questions posed by that.
  - maxilevi 4y ago
    While true, Adobe Firefly is significantly worse than models from companies like Midjourney
    - ChatGTP 4y ago
      That should probably be telling you something, ripping off all the good art that artists do makes for better pictures?
raverbashing 4y ago
Except none of the mentioned countries has banned it (except Italy, of course) Title is clickbait, those countries are considering the privacy implication of it
throwaway22032 4y ago
They couldn't even get the bloody cookie law right. Good luck banning a text interface. Christ, we could probably proxy it over morse code.
- mftrhu 4y ago
  > They couldn't even get the bloody cookie law right. What are you talking about? > Good luck banning a text interface. Christ, we could probably proxy it over morse code. Yes. You could. How many people have the know-how to do that, though? How many of them have an ham radio license? How many of them would be willing to deal with the eventual consequences of getting caught breaking the law?
  - throwaway22032 4y ago
    That european regulations on tech are generally ill thought out nonsense that fall apart as soon as it hits the real world.
deleted 4y ago
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twelve40 4y ago
I bet they will still continue to hoover up all kinds of data from Europe, either directly or via common crawl. So these "bans" seem really tough to enforce, they may end up in a disadvatageous situation where openai is banned from usage by EU citizens, but the european data is still collected for training, daily by the terabyte. PS it's kind of hilarious we're in the land of internet bans in the west now, eu bans openai, us bans tiktok, full speed ahead towards censored walled gardens.
- microtonal 4y ago
  It will be a risk for companies that do operate in the EU though, like Google and Microsoft. Even if they'd sell their LLM-enabled products outside the EU, they could still be fined for using EU citizen data unauthorized. And this seems nearly impossible to untangle. Like, how do you know on a content-generating site which posts were written by EU citizens and which weren't? Exposing that information alone could be a privacy violation.
FpUser 4y ago
I think banning it is incredibly stupid. But if Europe wants to stay in dark ages it is their choice.
_tk_ 4y ago
Very clickbait-y title. It is not clear that any other county's data privacy agency is considering a ban. It has become apparent that they are following up with their Italian counterparts. Something that if you put in one sentence seems blatantly obvious. "Several other European data privacy agencies follow up with Italian data privacy agency after Chat GPT ban."
kimi 4y ago
To use an Italian proverb, "the mother of fools is always pregnant".
KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
Europe is doing the right thing, gen AI can be a massive productivity boon but regulators coming in to ensure that the wealth created goes to the people instead of centralized foreign entities is definitely a good thing. In the space left by ClosedAI open source and locally run versions can flourish instead.
- frollo 4y ago
  While this is a legitimate consideration, what EU regulators are doing right now is a step behind: they're trying to ensure that European data doesn't get syphoned out for shiny baubles again. Anybody setting up an European chatGPT would be golden for the moment, even if it introduced back the same centralization of wealth.
- zmnd 4y ago
  To ensure that the wealth doesn't go to foreign entities, they could create a CERN-like organization and fund AI/ML research, with the short term focus on LLMs. What they are ensuring is that the jobs would go to countries that have 10x productivity (or whatever productivity gain we will get). Quite opposite to ensuring that the wealth accumulates among workers.
m3kw9 4y ago
But in reality, there is a lot of fear of job replacement and this will stem their fears, it’s inevitable because when another country uses it to their advantage, it won’t feel good
frollo 4y ago
I'm happy to see that even people on HN, a space supposedly for tech-oriented people, have exactly zero clue about the difference between chatGPT, GPT itself and a generic LLM. But here you are pretending you know stuff while you try to lecture Europeans on what's best for us. This place has become a parody of itself.
- obstacle3596 4y ago
  The same way Europeans are always lecturing Americans on what's best for us, or different?
  - manuelmoreale 4y ago
    I come on this site to learn about new tech and to generally be informed about what’s going on in tech and tech adjacent topics. Comments are usually great but I can’t help but notice that every time an article like this one is posted the discussion quickly degenerate into either a contest of who’s better at something between countries, which is completely idiotic, or a silly subtle flame war. Goes to show that even in places where people are smart and can be nuanced, discussions that involve national identities are hard to handle. Personally, I think it’s ok for different countries to deal with the same issues differently. I’m fine with the US (or California if we’re being honest here) pushing for new technologies and being in the forefront. And I’m fine with the EU being more considerate when it comes to their approach to pretty much everything. Everything has pros and cons. I just find it interesting that no matter the platform, certain topics seems to always pull out the worst attitude in people.
  - Woeps 4y ago
    Truth be told, The EU-peeps where often correct ...
stainablesteel 4y ago
great, maybe these politicians will finally get voted out
azubinski 4y ago
And so you get into a flying car, pay for rent with crypto, command ChatGPT to write a new great novel, but this hype will end.
rcarr 4y ago
It kind of makes sense for Italy and possibly France to ban it in terms of the culture of those countries which have always stuck two fingers up at what everyone else is doing in favour of their own approach to life. I’m quite surprised Ireland and Germany are taking this approach though, particularly the former where the tech industry is providing a substantial amount of the high paying jobs in the economy.
troad 4y ago
I’m curious at what point we’ll get the first mid-sized or larger company - someone without a physical presence in Europe - simply shrugging their shoulders at EU regulators. Given the rapid expansion of EU regulation of tech in recent years, it can’t be that far off. I’m curious what happens next!
- pg_1234 4y ago
  If they continue to violate EU law beyond the reach of enforcement, the fines and interest on fines builds up in abstentia. This remains as an ongoing liability. If they were ever to be acquired by a corporate with a presence in the EU, it would inherit that liability and be forced to pay or exit the EU. The net market value of the original transgressing company, as seen by any potential acquirer with a global presence (so probably all of them) therefore drops steadily ... eventually well into the negatives. This will severely impact the listed market cap even if the company is not looking to ever be acquired. If sufficiently provoked, the EU could also issue sanctions against any other company doing business with them in the mean time. Eventually most first-world banks are loath to touch the business. Things decline from there ...
  - troad 4y ago
    > If they were ever to be acquired by a corporate with a presence in the EU, it would inherit that liability and be forced to pay or exit the EU. Absolutely, but that wouldn't really affect the vast majority of smaller or mid-sized businesses in the US and China (and elsewhere). Not everyone is looking for an exit. You're absolutely right for major public companies, and I doubt we'll see them doing anything like this. (Though eventually some could withdraw from Europe altogether if it ceases to make economic sense to be in compliance.) > If sufficiently provoked, the EU could also issue sanctions against any other company doing business with them in the mean time. Hmm, this seems fairly unlikely for a smaller or mid-sized business. Possible, certainly, but unlikely. > Eventually most first-world banks are loath to touch the business. This one though, I very much doubt. Why would a regional US bank refuse to lend to a local mid-sized B2B supplier with good credit and in good standing, just because the Latvian privacy authority is upset with them for practices that are entirely legal and ordinary in the US? More broadly though, I am genuinely curious where one would draw the line on foreign compliance. Any business anyone starts is presumably out of compliance with North Korean law, but (understandably) this is kind of just ignored. What about Tajik law though? Or South African law? I presume there's a balancing act involved with these decisions, but say there is a hypothetical Chinese entity that just doesn't have very much exposure to EU markets: getting them to comply with (potentially onerous) EU regulations could become an increasingly hard sell. I'm not saying this is a desirable outcome, to be clear, I just wonder at what point the incentives will cease to align and we'll begin to see more non-compliance by non-EU entities with EU regulation.
olalonde 4y ago
So Europe is basically being denied access to what is possibly paradigm-shifting technology because a few bureaucrats decided to. A quick reminder of what GDPR proponents were saying in 2018: > Thank you for teaching me about rules-based and principles-based regulation. This is one of the big reasons I enjoy living in Europe tbh, a bit of discretion and old 'common sense' is actually quite an awesome thing. > However, after the initial bring-up pains any business which continues to have a problem with the GPDR most likely has a business model directly in conflict with the spirit of the law. > Customers are going to have a choice between GDPR-compliant companies and USA-only ones and (if they care) they are going to assume the worst about why the GDPR can make a company retreat from the EU market. > The GDPR gets so much hate because it hits so many businesses where it hurts: data. [...] Of course that's annoying from a business perspective, but from an individuals privacy perspective, it's fantastic. > One surprising side effect of this might be that the hordes of machine learners and data scientists who used to work for adtech might go to healthcare/bioinformatics where we might get new breakthroughs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17099484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17099484 Here's my prediction: VPN sales through the roof in Europe.
- revelio 4y ago
  That last one is golden.
johndhi 4y ago
This is a really interesting thread to read as a lawyer who spends his days (recently) considering how existing laws apply to AI training and operation. I'll start by describing my understanding of the allegation, and then talk to some points raised. I don't read Italian, but the English-language statement by Garante (Italy) is here. [0]. It appears to allege both that the original training (creation of the model) and the ongoing improvement via customer Inputs was done without a "legal basis." GDPR requires companies to have a "legal basis" for processing personal data before they do so -- whether that be from consent, or a legitimate interest (very vague), or for a task carried out in the public interest. Italy isn't going into details, but saying they're banning while they investigate. Some interesting questions raised in the thread: does the model actually contain personal data? Probably yes. Even if data is converted to integers during training, since those integers can be reversed into personal data, GDPR counts it as "pseudonymized" not "anonymized," and therefore subject to GDPR. Did OpenAI actually not get consent? It seems to me they did obtain consent for using user inputs for training, since their terms of service plainly state they will use inputs for training data. But GDPR likes to demand higher standards of consent (checkboxes) and as far as I know OpenAI didn't use checkboxes. I think this is pretty interesting to watch play out. [0] - https://www.gpdp.it/web/guest/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/docweb/9870847 https://www.gpdp.it/web/guest/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/d...
- jmiskovic 4y ago
  Finally some facts - the rest of the thread is wild speculation and blind judgement. Yes, few countries lose access to strongest available LLM while the investigation is undergoing. There are bigger things at stake. I don't think this is about current model containing personal data. IMO this is about "Open"AI operation, a US based company (with US lack of regulation and disregard for user privacy) collecting the data about the rest of the world. And we are talking about _very_ personal data. The kind of data people would be reluctant to share even with their doctors and psychologists, but will still mention to the non-judgemental chatbot with a memory they can seemingly wipe at will. This is potentially dangerous. Governments should at least investigate how this data is collected and used. The funny thing is, both sides of Atlantic benefit when EU is enforcing the GDPR. Italy, France, Germany... that's already a big enough market for a more ethical competitor to step in and provide an alternative LLM. We desperately need another player in this field. (BTW, please sign the LAION's petition to democratize the AI research)
devit 4y ago
Italy has not banned ChatGPT: that would be accomplished by a DNS-level block on national ISP resolvers that has not been applied, which would be trivially circumvented by using an unaffected DNS resolver. Rather, OpenAI has decided to respond to an injuction to stop processing Italian PII within 20 days by immediately configuring their Cloudflare account to block connections from IPs where the GeoIP lookup resolves to Italy, which is easily circumvented by a VPN or proxy.
jacooper 4y ago
As long as bing is still online, I'm fine. Chatgpt is basically useless for me since it can't actually look anything up and read docs.
dang 4y ago
Url changed from https://stealthoptional.com/news/italys-chatgpt-ban-spreads-to-france-germany-and-ireland/ https://stealthoptional.com/news/italys-chatgpt-ban-spreads-..., which points to this. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
portsundayslak 4y ago
Europe has GDPR laws to protect user rights and privacy. ChatGPT was not complying hence it was banned until they comply.

102 points by firstSpeaker 4y ago

Here's the thing: the Europeans have a cast iron case. No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise. This is not to endorse the European position - which is foolish, regressive and short sighted - but only to outline the case overly bureaucratised societies make when established protocols encounters innovation.

hindsightbias 4y ago
Soylent Green is people. At least the original sources there got a good video show and nice drugs.
luckylion 4y ago
> No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise. It's about privacy concerns, not copyright.
- throwntoday 4y ago
  Governments with heavy social programs can't risk losing anymore taxpayers at a time where their systems are already strained by a lack of workers/population decline. This seems like a preemptive measure to prevent that more than a result of privacy concerns.
  - microtonal 4y ago
    Presuming these ulterior motives gets so tiresome. These bans are instated by data protection authorities, which largely operate independently. E.g., the Dutch data protection authority regularly fines the government. Pretty sure that is the case for other EU countries too.
    - throwntoday 4y ago
      You're welcome to disagree with my presumption but you don't appear to be stating anything definitive about this matter either. All these governments have a duty to their aging population, which also tends to make up the majority of the active voter base. Every action they take tends to be multipronged but at the end of the day it's meant to protect those social programs. Consider mass migration to increase labor force and birth rates. Sure they can claim it was purely out of good will, but you'd have to be pretty myopic not to see the reality there.
      - mftrhu 4y ago
        You keep on conflating data protection agencies with governments. They aren't the same thing - the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali is an independent administrative authority - and even the GP pointed that out.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    I assure you, unless it's about multi-billion euro companies, the German state does not care at all whether they'll lose a tax payer or ten or ten thousands (source: me, a tax payer that gets fucked by the bureaucracy at every opportunity). Data Protection is taken extremely seriously and everything that is associated with "big data" is extra suspicious. Throw in "think of the children" for extra spice. I doubt tax income on copyright dividends even registers.
ribosometronome 4y ago
Cast iron case for what?
- deleted 4y ago
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cguess 4y ago
The main argument is around GDPR which limits/bans the collection and storage of personal information without consent. They definitely did this, and it's quite clear in the law that it's unacceptable (as it should be). OpenAI is the worst of the SV/SF "if we get big enough before we get caught it won't matter" mentality. Unsurprising given who's behind the company.
- CSMastermind 4y ago
  What does collection and storage of personal information mean in this case? The model weights? They're integers. There's no personal information stored in the model. The fact that the model can generate someone's personal information is like saying that a person can type someone's personal information into a Word document so we should ban Office 365.
  - mola 4y ago
    All digital data is just bytes...
basisword 4y ago
>> This is not to endorse the European position - which is foolish, regressive and short sighted Potentially, but I’m glad somebody is taking a minute to question whether or not a handful of tech companies have the right to consume everyone’s information, build their entire business with it and then sell that back to the people whose data they wouldn’t have existed without in the first place.
- hunglee2 4y ago
  yes I agree that the query is not a bad thing. However, what I think is a bad thing is if the query ends up with a ban (which I think it will) and prevents the obvious value of this new class of technology for the rest of humanity
- berkle4455 4y ago
  > have the right to consume everyone’s information, build their entire business with it and then sell that back to the people That’s quite literally what google has done for 25 years, just with advertising for monetization.
  - medvezhenok 4y ago
    Yes, and arguably Google has been way under-regulated for the externalities they caused to the system (one example is having adversarial bidding wars for companies over their own keywords, which is simply a rentier tax on Google advertising) I think we're finally coming around on that (I think a lot of regulators were slow on antitrust in the internet space because the harm to the consumer/environment is not immediately obvious - i.e. it's mostly non-monetary externalities) Same as America as a whole and offshoring to reduce labor cost. The externalities are slow but they're clearly there in the increasing polarization and the growth of the precariat.
  - basisword 4y ago
    It’s not. Indexing and linking to primary sources is very different to consuming all of those primary sources and spitting it back without attribution. Google entered this area a bit with the info boxes they display alongside results but it’s a very different proposition from AI.
ildon 4y ago
At least for what Italy is concerned, the issues raised do not seem to be correlated to the training phase, but rather to the actual usage of chatGPT.
- ildon 4y ago
  Also, based on the combination of the fact that data was made public, article 6, paragraph 1, letter f), and their business, I would argue that their use of personal data scraped on the web for training purposes is legitimate
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise I see the argument. (I'm not sure it's the one Italy made.) Still, it's weird to see GDPR turning into a generic IP bludgeon being cheered on.
microtonal 4y ago
No consent was given by the content creators, no consultation was attempted, and certainly no share of compensation offered, for what is now a commercial enterprise. But these bans are not based on potential copyright violation of content that was used to train the original model. The ban is primarily based on GDPR violations, so privacy. The ban in Italy seems to be based on three point: - A data breach occurring on March 20. - Mass collection of private data for training the model (not sure whether this refers to ChatGPT user queries or the original data, which could contain privacy-sensitive data, also see 'right to forget'). - No age verification. See e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65139406 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65139406
oh_sigh 4y ago
That's not why they banned it though. If chatGPT was offered as a downloadable model which any user could run on their own machine with no internet access, there would be no basis for the ban.
FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
When I read any of your comments, a part of it stays in mind, forever. Does that mean I have to pay you royalties for thinking about it or mentioning it? I don't think so. GPT is like a primitive intelligence that read a large part of the web and got influenced by it, nobody deserves compensation or consultation for the public data it was trained on. If you put something on a public internet page, you should expect that other beings, artificial or not, are going to get influenced by it.
- qgin 4y ago
  It’s not immoral or unethical to digest information, but the difference is when a computer can do that digesting of information the scale is very different than if a human does it and it blows up the incentives for people to create content in the first place. In the most extreme version, no human writing would be read or seen by other humans, it would be all fuel for the machine intelligence. If that it to be our future, we have to figure out how to rearrange incentives so that humans continue to be motivated to create the content that feeds the machine intelligence or the whole system falls apart.
- Out_of_Characte 4y ago
  Does that mean I have to pay you royalties for thinking about it or mentioning it? Yes, if HN were to post copyrighted work that only they could spread, then you would be liable. In the same trend, any patents that HN comments share should not be redistributed/sold by you. Chatgpt circumvents copyright law in a way that is hard to detect. How many sentences of moby dick does it take to prove chatgpt is plagiarising other peoples protected works?
  - nradov 4y ago
    That is mostly not how US copyright or patent law works. Your claim just wrong. It is legal to spread limited amounts of copyrighted material under fair use, and anyone can create and sell new content based on copyrighted material as long as it is sufficiently transformative. It's also totally legal to print out a bunch of patents and redistribute those in a book or whatever (except on certain secret patents which aren't relevant here). You can't copyright a patent filing. The only legal restrictions are on building and selling things that infringe on patent claims.
danielrhodes 4y ago
I am not a lawyer, but this doesn’t seem strong at all. How is it different than a person reading several books on a subject and giving a speech based on what they’ve learned? Obviously if the speech was repeating verbatim what was read, this would not be acceptable. But that is not the case here. Likewise, should the authors of books a child learns to read with be able to claim copyright over all works and language the child produces afterwards simply because their material formed the basis for that child’s neural network related to reading and writing?
- mola 4y ago
  Not a lawyer either, but I think it's different because it's not a person...
calibas 4y ago
> No consent was given by the content creators I assumed consent was hidden deep in some ToS agreement.
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- deleted 4y ago
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m3kw9 4y ago
Yeah, just forget llm,gpt and the fancy words for a min, you have a company it reads websites data it deems useful and creates a middle layer API to regurgitate/massage all that work back to you and charging you a fee. OpenAI deserves fee but are they forgetting where the training data came from?
fithisux 4y ago
For this they are right.
gumballindie 4y ago
> which is foolish, regressive and short sighted Yet americans constantly complain about china not honouring ip protection laws. Why should a company such as openai be allowed to steal content and then reproduce it without royalties?
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thefz 4y ago
> which is foolish, regressive and short sighted Foolish and regressive because we don't want a foreign corporation to raise almost endless profit off of our data? Keep your products in the US then, nothing of value will be lost if we prevent access to Meta, Twitter and all this bullshit.

Lapsa 4y ago

tbf that's actually my biggest concern too. make it run on an offline personal pocket calculator, please

AdilZtn 4y ago

Regulating but not innovating. Always the same story, always the same result ..

mellosouls 4y ago
You're posting that on the web (European innovation)...
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  Yes, the first 0.001% of the technology came from Europe. What have you done for us in this millennium?
  - cguess 4y ago
    Spotify to name one.
    - pb7 4y ago
      Spotify who set up shop in the US at the first indication of viability? Not very promising for the EU when the majority of their employees are in the US.
      - cguess 4y ago
        They were in Europe for years before moving to the States. Also Siemens then. The European tech scene isn't as sexy, they tend to make things that are useful, not just things that get VC hype.
    - zmnd 4y ago
      And now compare how many employees they have in the US vs EU.
      - neom 4y ago
        Pretty sure they also trade on the NYSE?

hef19898 4y ago

>> tech news outlet Reuters (from the article) Was this articlr writen by ChatGPT itself? It sure reads like it...

piaste 4y ago
Worse. It was written by a low-quality content mill that is one step above spam. The Germany 'ban', for example? A German newspaper asked the Federal Commissioner if it could be blocked, and he answered "In principle, it could be", then followed with a bunch of boring nuanced qualifications that nobody wants to read, like the fact that in Germany this would be a state-level decision, or that they have just asked the Italian authorities for more information. https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/nach-vorstoss-in-italien-man-kann-technologie-nicht-mit-verboten-aufhalten-diskussion-um-chatgpt-regulierung-in-deutschland/29075002.html https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/nach-vorsto... A couple of rounds of 'journalist' telephone game later, and it has become "ChatGPT Ban Spreads to Germany". Utter trash.

blibble 4y ago

seems reasonable if there's ANY PII at all in the training set then the weights and any output should be treated as PII too of course the only way to verify that a model doesn't contain PII is to provide the entire training set and the process for turning it into a model and opening up this data would completely destroy any economic benefit that could be gained from exploitation of the model which in turn completely destroys any incentive to create it in the first place what a pity

olivierduval 4y ago

Actually, there's two interesting things: 1. it shows that Europe is starting to act "as a whole" : Italy used RGPD to ban ChatGPT (whatever the motivation) so every counrty in EU has to think about it and ban it too 2. what some people call "regressive legislation" is the legislation that want to stop IA from using any sources to build without paying the content creator for it... And if I remember correctly, nobody is pretending that it's fair

systemvoltage 4y ago

EU’s position will have zero impact on progress of AI, they’ll regress into ever increasing socialist state. If I were a EU citizen, I would fear the disadvantage of being left behind without the most powerful innovation of our times.

gaoshan 4y ago

Right or wrong this is just going to lead to others taking the lead and accelerating away in this technology.

jpalomaki 4y ago

So access to the system is blocked from these countries, but it continues to utilize the problematic data to server customers in other countries? Not sure if this is really the best approach.

dash2 4y ago

Here's my hypothesis of what is going on: 1. Europe can't do computers. This is bad for them, because foreign companies, who can do computers, make money in Europe and beat out the local competition. 2. But the EU has discovered that it can extract money by threatening to ban the foreign companies for reasons of privacy, data protection etc. 3. Since the EU is a valuable market, the companies accept the fines as a price of doing business. 4. Italy is getting in early by firing a shot across the bows of OpenAI, which is not yet a huge moneymaker, but may be in future.

GalenErso 4y ago
> Since the EU is a valuable market For how long? A market is large because it has highly productive economies. If Europe can't hack computers, as you say, their growth potential will be curtailed.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Europe can't hack computers, as you say, their growth potential will be curtailed European industry is alive and well, and it can buy the tools it needs from American companies. To the degree "Europe can't hack computers" is less of a ridiculous oversimplification, it's with pertinence to the consumer market.
  - shuckles 4y ago
    Is it really alive and well or is it mostly booking profits for activities conducted elsewhere in the world? How much R&D, manufacturing, or distribution do the ABBs and Siemens of the world actually depend physically on the EU for?
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > How much R&D, manufacturing, or distribution do the ABBs and Siemens of the world actually depend physically on the EU for European heavy industry expertise is deep [1]. It also undergirds a lot of America production; Rheinmetall, for instance, designs and builds the M1 Abrams’ gun. In light industry, ASML is the product of a distributed precision manufacturing culture. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_manufacturing_companies_by_revenue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_man...

inductive_magic 4y ago

As a German with very limited faith in our government, I don't think they'll pull through with this. Our current coalition isn't this deranged; the ratio between potential gains and potential losses just doesn't add up. We're a regressive bunch, but not that regressive. I hope.

jacooper 4y ago
It breaks the laws, its openAI's problem not Europe's fault for caring about privacy.

misssocrates 4y ago

Is this the beginning of the Butlerian Jihad?

bigmattystyles 4y ago

Apropos of nothing, I noticed French media pronounces GPT geepeetee instead of what in French should be jaypaytay. Probably because it sounds just like ‘J’ai pété’ which means ‘I farted.’ Since chat is the French word for cat, saying ChatGPT out loud,is basically saying ‘Cat, I farted’.

nedsma 4y ago
Hahaha, this is so funny. Thank you for sharing. See also Nvidia culitho and its meaning in Spanish.
- triggerw4rn 4y ago
  [flagged]
HeckFeck 4y ago
Now OpenAI have their new mascot.
addcommitpush 4y ago
“Chat” as in “internet discussion” is pronounced the same way in French as in English, as it is an English loan word, and not like “Chat” as in “cat”.

serjester 4y ago

Ethical considerations aside, I'm not sure how a country stays competitive on the global landscape if they refuse to use some form of LLM models over the next 20 years. The productivity gains possible with these relatively early iterations is far too large to ignore. Maybe they'll fund their own versions but their past history doing this hasn't been reassuring [1]. [1] https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/eu-approves-166-million-in-funding-for-google-competitor/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/eu-approves-16...

blibble 4y ago
it's perfectly reasonable to assume that some countries may ban or restrict LLMs entirely and place trade sanctions/penalties on goods/services imported from that don't have similar/comparable legal prohibitions (similar to the GDPR and/or plans for carbon producers)
wongarsu 4y ago
Adobe Firefly showed you can train generative image models without ignoring the copyright questions posed by this, over the next 20 years someone will figure out how to train an LLM without ignoring the GDPR questions posed by that.
- maxilevi 4y ago
  While true, Adobe Firefly is significantly worse than models from companies like Midjourney
  - ChatGTP 4y ago
    That should probably be telling you something, ripping off all the good art that artists do makes for better pictures?

raverbashing 4y ago

Except none of the mentioned countries has banned it (except Italy, of course) Title is clickbait, those countries are considering the privacy implication of it

throwaway22032 4y ago

They couldn't even get the bloody cookie law right. Good luck banning a text interface. Christ, we could probably proxy it over morse code.

mftrhu 4y ago
> They couldn't even get the bloody cookie law right. What are you talking about? > Good luck banning a text interface. Christ, we could probably proxy it over morse code. Yes. You could. How many people have the know-how to do that, though? How many of them have an ham radio license? How many of them would be willing to deal with the eventual consequences of getting caught breaking the law?
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  That european regulations on tech are generally ill thought out nonsense that fall apart as soon as it hits the real world.

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twelve40 4y ago

I bet they will still continue to hoover up all kinds of data from Europe, either directly or via common crawl. So these "bans" seem really tough to enforce, they may end up in a disadvatageous situation where openai is banned from usage by EU citizens, but the european data is still collected for training, daily by the terabyte. PS it's kind of hilarious we're in the land of internet bans in the west now, eu bans openai, us bans tiktok, full speed ahead towards censored walled gardens.

microtonal 4y ago
It will be a risk for companies that do operate in the EU though, like Google and Microsoft. Even if they'd sell their LLM-enabled products outside the EU, they could still be fined for using EU citizen data unauthorized. And this seems nearly impossible to untangle. Like, how do you know on a content-generating site which posts were written by EU citizens and which weren't? Exposing that information alone could be a privacy violation.

FpUser 4y ago

I think banning it is incredibly stupid. But if Europe wants to stay in dark ages it is their choice.

_tk_ 4y ago

Very clickbait-y title. It is not clear that any other county's data privacy agency is considering a ban. It has become apparent that they are following up with their Italian counterparts. Something that if you put in one sentence seems blatantly obvious. "Several other European data privacy agencies follow up with Italian data privacy agency after Chat GPT ban."

kimi 4y ago

To use an Italian proverb, "the mother of fools is always pregnant".

KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago

Europe is doing the right thing, gen AI can be a massive productivity boon but regulators coming in to ensure that the wealth created goes to the people instead of centralized foreign entities is definitely a good thing. In the space left by ClosedAI open source and locally run versions can flourish instead.

frollo 4y ago
While this is a legitimate consideration, what EU regulators are doing right now is a step behind: they're trying to ensure that European data doesn't get syphoned out for shiny baubles again. Anybody setting up an European chatGPT would be golden for the moment, even if it introduced back the same centralization of wealth.
zmnd 4y ago
To ensure that the wealth doesn't go to foreign entities, they could create a CERN-like organization and fund AI/ML research, with the short term focus on LLMs. What they are ensuring is that the jobs would go to countries that have 10x productivity (or whatever productivity gain we will get). Quite opposite to ensuring that the wealth accumulates among workers.

m3kw9 4y ago

But in reality, there is a lot of fear of job replacement and this will stem their fears, it’s inevitable because when another country uses it to their advantage, it won’t feel good

frollo 4y ago

I'm happy to see that even people on HN, a space supposedly for tech-oriented people, have exactly zero clue about the difference between chatGPT, GPT itself and a generic LLM. But here you are pretending you know stuff while you try to lecture Europeans on what's best for us. This place has become a parody of itself.

obstacle3596 4y ago
The same way Europeans are always lecturing Americans on what's best for us, or different?
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  I come on this site to learn about new tech and to generally be informed about what’s going on in tech and tech adjacent topics. Comments are usually great but I can’t help but notice that every time an article like this one is posted the discussion quickly degenerate into either a contest of who’s better at something between countries, which is completely idiotic, or a silly subtle flame war. Goes to show that even in places where people are smart and can be nuanced, discussions that involve national identities are hard to handle. Personally, I think it’s ok for different countries to deal with the same issues differently. I’m fine with the US (or California if we’re being honest here) pushing for new technologies and being in the forefront. And I’m fine with the EU being more considerate when it comes to their approach to pretty much everything. Everything has pros and cons. I just find it interesting that no matter the platform, certain topics seems to always pull out the worst attitude in people.
- Woeps 4y ago
  Truth be told, The EU-peeps where often correct ...

stainablesteel 4y ago

great, maybe these politicians will finally get voted out

azubinski 4y ago

And so you get into a flying car, pay for rent with crypto, command ChatGPT to write a new great novel, but this hype will end.

rcarr 4y ago

It kind of makes sense for Italy and possibly France to ban it in terms of the culture of those countries which have always stuck two fingers up at what everyone else is doing in favour of their own approach to life. I’m quite surprised Ireland and Germany are taking this approach though, particularly the former where the tech industry is providing a substantial amount of the high paying jobs in the economy.

troad 4y ago

I’m curious at what point we’ll get the first mid-sized or larger company - someone without a physical presence in Europe - simply shrugging their shoulders at EU regulators. Given the rapid expansion of EU regulation of tech in recent years, it can’t be that far off. I’m curious what happens next!

pg_1234 4y ago
If they continue to violate EU law beyond the reach of enforcement, the fines and interest on fines builds up in abstentia. This remains as an ongoing liability. If they were ever to be acquired by a corporate with a presence in the EU, it would inherit that liability and be forced to pay or exit the EU. The net market value of the original transgressing company, as seen by any potential acquirer with a global presence (so probably all of them) therefore drops steadily ... eventually well into the negatives. This will severely impact the listed market cap even if the company is not looking to ever be acquired. If sufficiently provoked, the EU could also issue sanctions against any other company doing business with them in the mean time. Eventually most first-world banks are loath to touch the business. Things decline from there ...
- troad 4y ago
  > If they were ever to be acquired by a corporate with a presence in the EU, it would inherit that liability and be forced to pay or exit the EU. Absolutely, but that wouldn't really affect the vast majority of smaller or mid-sized businesses in the US and China (and elsewhere). Not everyone is looking for an exit. You're absolutely right for major public companies, and I doubt we'll see them doing anything like this. (Though eventually some could withdraw from Europe altogether if it ceases to make economic sense to be in compliance.) > If sufficiently provoked, the EU could also issue sanctions against any other company doing business with them in the mean time. Hmm, this seems fairly unlikely for a smaller or mid-sized business. Possible, certainly, but unlikely. > Eventually most first-world banks are loath to touch the business. This one though, I very much doubt. Why would a regional US bank refuse to lend to a local mid-sized B2B supplier with good credit and in good standing, just because the Latvian privacy authority is upset with them for practices that are entirely legal and ordinary in the US? More broadly though, I am genuinely curious where one would draw the line on foreign compliance. Any business anyone starts is presumably out of compliance with North Korean law, but (understandably) this is kind of just ignored. What about Tajik law though? Or South African law? I presume there's a balancing act involved with these decisions, but say there is a hypothetical Chinese entity that just doesn't have very much exposure to EU markets: getting them to comply with (potentially onerous) EU regulations could become an increasingly hard sell. I'm not saying this is a desirable outcome, to be clear, I just wonder at what point the incentives will cease to align and we'll begin to see more non-compliance by non-EU entities with EU regulation.

olalonde 4y ago

So Europe is basically being denied access to what is possibly paradigm-shifting technology because a few bureaucrats decided to. A quick reminder of what GDPR proponents were saying in 2018: > Thank you for teaching me about rules-based and principles-based regulation. This is one of the big reasons I enjoy living in Europe tbh, a bit of discretion and old 'common sense' is actually quite an awesome thing. > However, after the initial bring-up pains any business which continues to have a problem with the GPDR most likely has a business model directly in conflict with the spirit of the law. > Customers are going to have a choice between GDPR-compliant companies and USA-only ones and (if they care) they are going to assume the worst about why the GDPR can make a company retreat from the EU market. > The GDPR gets so much hate because it hits so many businesses where it hurts: data. [...] Of course that's annoying from a business perspective, but from an individuals privacy perspective, it's fantastic. > One surprising side effect of this might be that the hordes of machine learners and data scientists who used to work for adtech might go to healthcare/bioinformatics where we might get new breakthroughs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17099484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17099484 Here's my prediction: VPN sales through the roof in Europe.

revelio 4y ago
That last one is golden.

johndhi 4y ago

This is a really interesting thread to read as a lawyer who spends his days (recently) considering how existing laws apply to AI training and operation. I'll start by describing my understanding of the allegation, and then talk to some points raised. I don't read Italian, but the English-language statement by Garante (Italy) is here. [0]. It appears to allege both that the original training (creation of the model) and the ongoing improvement via customer Inputs was done without a "legal basis." GDPR requires companies to have a "legal basis" for processing personal data before they do so -- whether that be from consent, or a legitimate interest (very vague), or for a task carried out in the public interest. Italy isn't going into details, but saying they're banning while they investigate. Some interesting questions raised in the thread: does the model actually contain personal data? Probably yes. Even if data is converted to integers during training, since those integers can be reversed into personal data, GDPR counts it as "pseudonymized" not "anonymized," and therefore subject to GDPR. Did OpenAI actually not get consent? It seems to me they did obtain consent for using user inputs for training, since their terms of service plainly state they will use inputs for training data. But GDPR likes to demand higher standards of consent (checkboxes) and as far as I know OpenAI didn't use checkboxes. I think this is pretty interesting to watch play out. [0] - https://www.gpdp.it/web/guest/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/docweb/9870847 https://www.gpdp.it/web/guest/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/d...

jmiskovic 4y ago
Finally some facts - the rest of the thread is wild speculation and blind judgement. Yes, few countries lose access to strongest available LLM while the investigation is undergoing. There are bigger things at stake. I don't think this is about current model containing personal data. IMO this is about "Open"AI operation, a US based company (with US lack of regulation and disregard for user privacy) collecting the data about the rest of the world. And we are talking about _very_ personal data. The kind of data people would be reluctant to share even with their doctors and psychologists, but will still mention to the non-judgemental chatbot with a memory they can seemingly wipe at will. This is potentially dangerous. Governments should at least investigate how this data is collected and used. The funny thing is, both sides of Atlantic benefit when EU is enforcing the GDPR. Italy, France, Germany... that's already a big enough market for a more ethical competitor to step in and provide an alternative LLM. We desperately need another player in this field. (BTW, please sign the LAION's petition to democratize the AI research)

devit 4y ago

Italy has not banned ChatGPT: that would be accomplished by a DNS-level block on national ISP resolvers that has not been applied, which would be trivially circumvented by using an unaffected DNS resolver. Rather, OpenAI has decided to respond to an injuction to stop processing Italian PII within 20 days by immediately configuring their Cloudflare account to block connections from IPs where the GeoIP lookup resolves to Italy, which is easily circumvented by a VPN or proxy.

jacooper 4y ago

As long as bing is still online, I'm fine. Chatgpt is basically useless for me since it can't actually look anything up and read docs.

dang 4y ago

Url changed from https://stealthoptional.com/news/italys-chatgpt-ban-spreads-to-france-germany-and-ireland/ https://stealthoptional.com/news/italys-chatgpt-ban-spreads-..., which points to this. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

portsundayslak 4y ago

Europe has GDPR laws to protect user rights and privacy. ChatGPT was not complying hence it was banned until they comply.