News
Expert opinion on Italy’s ban of ChatGPT and its potential impact on AI development and security concerns
April 2023 by Andy Patel, Senior Researcher at WithSecure Intelligence
Following the news that revealed that ChatGTP has been banned in Italy, Andy Patel research at WithSecure an expert in AI and open language models had this to say:
Andy Patel WithSecure:
– are these types of security concerns likely to reoccur?
– do you think other regulators will follow Italy? If so where?
– how much of a hindrance to AI development is this?
Yes, this is an overreaction.
No, the UK should not implement similar restrictions.
Yes, I imagine these security concerns will reoccur because people misunderstand what is going on.
ChatGPT is a natural progression of our technology. If Italy’s issue is with Italian citizens interacting with an invasive US technology company, bear in mind that most of the technologies we interact with come from the US. US-based social networks already control our discourse. As such, the fact that ChatGPT is hosted by a US company should not be a factor. Nor should concerns that AI might take over the world be.
ChatGPT is a useful tool that enables creativity and productivity. By shutting it off, Italy has cut off perhaps the most important tool available to our generation. All companies have security concerns, and, of course, employees should be instructed to not provide Chat-GPT and similar systems with company-sensitive data. Such policies should be controlled by individual organizations and not by the host country. By refraining from allowing the entire country from interfacing with ChatGPT and similar, they are essentially putting their country at a disadvantage. One would have to assume that by doing this, they have a plan to provide their citizens with an equivalent system. Do they have such plans?
Ultimately, shutting Italian citizens out from ChatGPT will have little effect on AI development. The datasets used to train these models already contain a great deal of examples of their language. If anything, by shutting off Italian input to future models will cause such models to be mildly worse for Italian inputs than for others. That’s not a great situation to be in.
