Italy’s data protection watchdog on Friday issued an immediate ban on access to OpenAI’s popular artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, citing alleged privacy violations.
In a statement, the Italian National Authority for Personal Data Protection said that ChatGPT had “suffered a data breach on March 20 concerning users’ conversations and payment information of subscribers to the paid service”.
The decision, which comes into “immediate effect,” will result in “the temporary limitation of the processing of Italian users’ data vis-à-vis [ChatGPT’s creator] OpenAI,” the watchdog said.
ChatGPT was launched in November 2022 and has since become hugely popular, impressing users with its ability to explain complex things clearly and succinctly, write in different styles and languages with a human-sounding tone, create poems and even pass exams.
ChatGPT can also be used to write computer code, without having the technical knowledge.