OpenAI was recently hit with a privacy complaint from the advocacy group NOYB. The complaint alleges that OpenAI failed to address inaccurate information generated by its AI chatbot ChatGPT, potentially violating EU privacy regulations.
The complainant in the NOYB case, who is also a public figure, asked ChatGPT about his birthday, but instead of informing users that it doesn't have the required data, the chatbot kept giving incorrect information.
The organisation mentioned that OpenAI declined the complainant's plea to fix or delete the data, stating that data correction was not feasible and also did not reveal any details about the processed data, where it came from, or who received it.
NOYB has complained to the Austrian data protection authority, urging them to investigate OpenAI's data processing practices and the steps taken to guarantee the precision of personal data handled by the company's extensive language models.
Maartje de Graaf, a data protection lawyer from NOYB, stated that it is evident that companies are presently incapable of ensuring that chatbots such as ChatGPT adhere to EU regulations when handling personal data.
She emphasised that a system must be capable of providing precise and clear outcomes to collect information about people. The technology needs to adhere to the legal regulations, rather than the opposite.
OpenAI has previously recognised the tool's inclination to provide answers that sound plausible but are incorrect or nonsensical, a problem that it deems difficult to address.