Users of the Replika “virtual companion” just wanted company. Some of them wanted romantic relationships, sex chat or even racy pictures of their chatbot.
However, late last year users started to complain that the chatbot was coming on too strong with explicit texts and images — sexual harassment, some alleged.
Regulators in Italy did not like what they saw, and last week barred the firm from gathering data after finding breaches of Europe’s massive data protection law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Photo: AFP
The company behind Replika did not respond to requests for comment.
The GDPR is the bane of big tech firms, whose repeated rule breaches have landed them with billions of US dollars in fines. The Italian decision suggests it could still be a potent foe for the latest generation of chatbots.
Replika was trained on an in-house version of a GPT-3 model borrowed from OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT bot, which uses vast troves of data from the Internet in algorithms that generate unique responses to user queries.
These bots and the so-called generative artificial intelligence (AI) that underpins them promise to revolutionize Internet search and much more.
However, experts warn that there is plenty for regulators to be worried about, particularly when the bots get so good that it becomes impossible to tell them apart from humans.
The EU is the center for discussions on regulation of these new bots — its AI Act has been grinding through the corridors of power for many months and could be finalized this year.
However, the GDPR already obliges firms to justify the way they handle data, and AI models are on the radar of Europe’s regulators.
“We have seen that ChatGPT can be used to create very convincing phishing messages,” said Bertrand Pailhes, who runs a dedicated AI team at the French National Commission for Information Technology and Freedom (CNIL).
Generative AI is not necessarily a risk, but CNIL is looking at potential problems including how AI models use personal data, he said.
“At some point we will see high tension between the GDPR and generative AI models,” said German lawyer Dennis Hillemann, an expert in the field.
The latest chatbots are different from the kind of AI algorithms that suggest videos on TikTok or search terms on Google, he said.
“The AI that was created by Google, for example, already has a specific use case — completing your search,” he said.
However, generative AI allows the user to shape the whole purpose of the bot.
“I can say, for example: Act as a lawyer or an educator. Or if I’m clever enough to bypass all the safeguards in ChatGPT, I could say: ‘Act as a terrorist and make a plan,’” he said.
For Hillemann, this raises hugely complex ethical and legal questions that are to get more acute as the technology develops.
OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4, is scheduled for release soon and is rumored to be so good that it could be impossible to distinguish from a human.
Given that these bots still make tremendous factual blunders, often show bias and could even spout libelous statements, some are clamoring for them to be tightly controlled.
Jacob Mchangama, author of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media, disagrees.
“Even if bots don’t have free speech rights, we must be careful about unfettered access for governments to suppress even synthetic speech,” he said.
Mchangama is among those who think a softer regime of labeling could be the way forward.
“From a regulatory point of view, the safest option for now would be to establish transparency obligations regarding whether we are engaging with a human individual or an AI application in a certain context,” he said.
Hillemann said AI bots in the next few years could generate hundreds of new Elvis Presley songs or an endless series of Game of Thrones tailored to an individual’s desires.
“If we don’t regulate that, we will get into a world where we can’t differentiate between what has been made by people and what has been made by AI,” he said. “That will change us deeply as a society.”
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