Consumer Protection Agencies Probe ChatGPT: Understanding the Impact

0:00Since the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI has made it pretty apparent that a big focus for them is trust and safety, yada yada, making sure their AI model is safe. but despite that a lot of different organizations and people have called for bans on chat gpt or urged investigations into it a new group has recently urged more investigations into open ai and chat gpt and so we are going to talk about that on the podcast today so what is happening now is that the european consumer organization or the beuc has joined this i guess you'd call it chorus of concerns about ChatGPT and of course other artificial intelligent chatbots, but obviously ChatGPT gets all of the spotlights since they're the first and kind of the biggest.

0:48But in any case, this new commission is calling on the EU consumer protection agencies to investigate the technology and the potential harm to individuals. Now, this is something we've seen a lot, mostly out of Europe, to be honest, right? We saw Italy completely ban ChatGPT for privacy reasons. Essentially, they said it's against their country's privacy rules. If ChatGPT used any data created by an Italian to train on it, then it would get banned. So they banned it. And it's kind of interesting. We see this a lot out of Europe. A lot of different European commissions are investigating OpenAI and ChatGPT.

1:24And this is traditionally how a lot of these privacy rules in big tech have gone, right? We have, you know, a lot of big ones that came out of the UK that GDPR and whatnot out of Europe that really have changed a lot of things about privacy online. And so a lot of companies have just kind of followed those rules for all of their for everyone because they are they are coming. So it's going to be interesting to see what sway the EU has on like Microsoft and OpenAI and ChatGPT and all of that. but in any case because essentially obviously open ai is becoming super popular um we are seeing not just microsoft dive in but we have like google working on their chatbot so this affects them we have amazon that recently announced they have a whole bunch of ai tools built into their aws cloud division um and it's kind of interesting because there's i recently saw an article from routers saying that every major tech company is getting into the race i think a lot of news organizations are perhaps over hyping this which is probably uh contributing to a lot of these different consumer protection groups and the eu and stuff doing investigations they're worried like oh man it's just open ai and chat gpt now but pretty soon it's going to be everyone and so they're kind of trying to get everything lined up now um in reality i think like routers like i was saying they recently said like amazon is gonna compete with chat gpt blah blah and like looking into it essentially they're just hosting like anthropic and other ai models on their aws back end so definitely not the same thing at all but yeah and they're like and meta's gonna do something i don't know people there's gonna be a lot of different people in the race but i do think that um chadgbt open ai have a really competitive advantage they have a really uh good thing built for them and um it's gonna be hard for other people to catch up i i don't know if um sounding the alarm is going to be super helpful at this moment.

3:23But in any case, the BEUC is pretty much an umbrella group of 46 consumer organizations from about 32 countries, set out its worries in separate letters earlier this month to the network of consumer safety authorities, which is the CSN network. and actually their main concern is that chat gpt can give out false information so it's kind of interesting you know we've seen different concerns from people we've seen the whole privacy risk we've seen the whole it's trained on our personal data and kind of concern out of italy and whatnot so now we're seeing the whole um it's not perfectly accurate which is pretty interesting um you know a lot obviously this thing has been dubbed like a research kind of product and we know it's kind of like being worked on in beta and I feel like they have a lot of disclaimers on the information so it is pretty interesting um that this is the big thing that they're pushing but um yeah there it's kind of interesting too because they said specifically um that it's deceptive advertising so that's the angle they're taking at it and they said that you know young consumers and children are more vulnerable to the risk of getting false information from here which is pretty interesting.

4:40And I mean, it's also, I mean, to be fair, as we see companies like Khan Academy integrating this into their educational products for children who are learning, I think it is an interesting concept to be aware of whether or not, you know, this is super accurate or not. And what kind of, you know, how they're kind of approaching that. So their specific statement, And they said is the BEUC thus asks you to investigate the risks that these AI systems pose to consumers as a matter of urgency to identify their presence in consumer markets and to explore what remedial action must be taken to avoid consumer harm.

5:18So essentially, they also called to start an exchange of information and an investigation into the safety of the products. You know, that's something people have always been talking about. So I don't think that's anything new, but it's going to be really interesting to see how this kind of new angle unfolds. Right. The whole, you know, protect children from fake information goes. And this just piles on to a whole slew of other regulatory people that are currently, you know, investigating them. And it's kind of interesting because, you know, when you think about it, what's what's the outcome? You know, I'm sure that they will be penalized in Europe by a bunch of commissions.

5:54Will that be good? Will different countries ban them? I'm not 100 percent sure. But at the end of the day, you know, what is really the outcome? Perhaps different countries lose access to Chad GPT. Perhaps it becomes less powerful. Personally, I don't really see this as being a massive positive for a lot of these countries that are heavily investigating. But maybe there will be some sort of benefits that come out of this, maybe some sort of good regulations for AI. So I think that is left to be seen. And we're going to have to watch the space to see how that continues to unfold.