First complaints to the CNIL against ChatGPT

Europe 1 with AFP 15:38 pm, April 05, 2023

At least two complaints about the use of personal data have been filed in France against the ChatGPT chatbot, already subject to various procedures in several countries, AFP learned Wednesday from the complainants. These two complaints, revealed by the site L'Informer, were filed Tuesday with the CNIL, the French gendarme of personal data. The first comes from lawyer Zoé Villain, president of the Janus International digital awareness association. "We are not anti-tech, but we want ethical technology," she told AFP.

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Lack of general conditions of use

In her complaint seen by AFP, Zoé Villain explains that she created an account on the website of OpenAI, the Californian company behind the software, in order to use ChatGPT and noted the absence of "general conditions of use" to accept and "any privacy policy". She asks the CNIL to help her exercise her right of access to her personal information collected by OpenAI, after an unsuccessful attempt made to the company. A second complaint was filed by David Libeau, a developer very invested in the protection of personal data. He explains in his complaint that he spotted personal information about him by asking ChatGPT about his profile.

"When I asked for more information, the algorithm started faking and attributing to me the creation of websites or the organization of online protests, which is totally false," he writes. Generative artificial intelligence, a technology used by ChatGPT to generate responses and which has been trained on gigantic corpora of texts gleaned from the internet, tends to invent certain facts, according to its designers.

According to David Libeau, this contravenes Article 5 of the European General Data Regulation (GDPR), according to which information about individuals must be accurate, and any data processing must be fair. Last Friday, Italy became the first country to temporarily block ChatGPT, due in part to concerns about the security of personal data, the lack of an information note to users and the lack of a filter to verify the age of users.

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OpenAI investigation opened in Canada

Other European authorities, including those of France, Ireland and Germany, have since approached their Italian counterpart to establish a common position on ChatGPT. On Tuesday, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada announced that it was opening an investigation into OpenAI, again about personal information. Generative AI is also under complaints from artists and press photographers who want to be able to accept or refuse to have their works used for training a model.