“If personal data is used, also as training data for the AI, then a legal basis is required,” said Dieter Kugelmann, head of the federal state task force for “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) to the Tagesspiegel, “We have to know where the data comes from .” Without a legal basis, the operation of ChatGPT would be illegal. The service creates images and texts at the user’s request, but often also spreads false claims, which it sometimes even tries to substantiate with invented sources.
RLP State Parliament President Hendrik Hering (left) congratulates Dieter Kugelmann (right) on his re-election as data protection officer on January 26, 2023
(Image: Landtag RLP)
In order to find out how the algorithms were trained, the data protection officers of the federal states have opened administrative proceedings against ChatGPT operator OpenAI. Together they have drawn up a uniform letter that they want to send off this week.
Italy is not the role model
How to proceed will depend on the responses from the US company. The data protection officers of the federal states also want to coordinate this internally. The Italian data protection authority provisionally banned ChatGPT on March 31. Before it can be used again, OpenAI must meet a number of requirements, including age verification to exclude minors.
Kugelmann considers Italy’s actions to be “risky and legally on shaky ground,” as he told the audience performed by the daily mirror has. First, the functionality of ChatGPT must be clarified. “The widespread rollout of the AI in blind flight – without a legal basis – that is the main problem,” said the lawyer. Kugelmann has been the State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Rhineland-Palatinate since 2015. He was previously a professor of public law at the German Police University in Münster. He was recently appointed to the new ChatGPT task force of the European Data Protection Board.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Amazon.com, among others. It was originally a non-profit research project, the findings of which were freely accessible. Since 2019, however, the profit-oriented subsidiary OpenAI LP has been the operating arm. Back then, Microsoft bought OpenAI for $1 billion.
Musk is suing Microsoft over ChatGPT
Speaking of Elon Musk: The Twitter boss announced on Thursday that he would sue Microsoft because ChatGPT was also trained using Twitter data without the appropriate license. The sudden resentment is likely to stem from the fact that Microsoft’s advertising platform will no longer support the management of Twitter accounts from next Tuesday. The background to this step are the high fees that Musk introduced for access to Twitter’s interfaces.
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