Please vote:
Consumer protection groups in the European Union have called on regulators to investigate the AI powered systems like ChatGPT, citing potential risks and the delay before the bloc’s groundbreaking AI regulations kick in.
Thirteen watchdogs wrote to their national consumer, data protection, competition and product safety authorities expressing a range of worries about generative artificial intelligence.
A transatlantic coalition of consumer groups even wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to protect consumers from any harms caused by generative AI.
The EU has been spearheading global efforts to regulate AI, which has become increasingly important with the rise of AI chatbots like ChatGPT that can create text, images, video and audio that imitate human work.
The European Union has finalized their first comprehensive tech regulations, but they will not take effect for two years.
Consumer groups from Italy, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Greece and Denmark are calling on European and U.S. leaders to use existing laws and introduce new legislation to tackle the potential harms of generative AI.
They pointed to a report by the Norwegian Consumer Council that outlines dangers such as providing incorrect medical advice, manipulating people, creating fake news articles and illegally harvesting personal data from the web.
The groups highlighted that while the EU’s AI Act will address some of these concerns eventually, it won’t be implemented for several years – leaving consumers exposed to this “insufficiently regulated” technology that’s moving at a rapid pace.
Some authorities have already taken action; for instance, Italy’s privacy watchdog has ordered OpenAI (the maker of ChatGPT) to stop processing user’s personal data while they investigate a possible data breach.
France, Spain and Canada have also been looking into OpenAI and ChatGPT.
