EU data watchdog warns of ‘hell on Earth’ scenario for US AI companies

cointelegraph.com:

Europe’s data watchdog, Wojciech Wiewiórowski, predicts a sour predicament for United States-based artificial intelligence (AI) companies currently being investigated for alleged GDPR violations.

“The breathless pace of development means data protection regulators need to be prepared for another scandal,” Wiewiórowski told MIT’s Technology Review during a recent interview, invoking the Cambridge Analytica scandal for reference.

Wiewiórowski’s comments come after a tumultuous week for leading AI outfit OpenAI, creator of the massively popular GPT suite of products and services. The company’s suite of GPT services has been outright banned in Italy pending further information about its intent and ability to comply with GDPR, with similar actions pending in Ireland, France and Germany.

According to the European Union (EU) data watchdog, OpenAI currently finds itself between a European rock and a U.S. hard place, legally speaking. As regulators in the EU look to crack down, U.S. lawmakers could be eyeing the European prescription as a possible local template:

Under this premise, for example, OpenAI could find itself unable to deploy and operate models such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 due to how they are designed and trained. GDPR law requires that citizens in the EU be given the ability to opt out of data collection and, in the event a system outputs erroneous data, to have those errors corrected.

However, some experts believe it will be next to impossible for developers to bring GPT and similar large language AI models (LLMs) in line with GDPR. One reason for this is that the data they’re trained on is often conflated, thus making individual data points inseparable from one another.

Wiewiórowski’s assessment, per the Technology Review