Earlier this month, I reported that Italy temporarily blocked ChatGPT over data privacy concerns.
The nation has now restored the chatbot after OpenAI addressed the concerns of the Italian regulatory agency.
The ChatGPT chatbot was reactivated in Italy after its maker OpenAI addressed issues raised by Italy’s data protection authority, the agency and the company confirmed on Friday.Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O)-backed OpenAI took ChatGPT offline in Italy last month after the country’s data protection authority, also known as Garante, temporarily banned the chatbot and launched a probe over the artificial intelligence application’s suspected breach of privacy rules.Garante had given a deadline till Sunday to OpenAI to address its concerns for allowing the chatbot to start operating again in the country.
The changes included the addition of an age verification element, as well as an updated privacy policy.
The measures include adding information on its website about how it collects and uses data that trains the algorithms powering ChatGPT, providing EU users with a new form for objecting to having their data used for training, and adding a tool to verify users’ ages when signing up.Some Italian users shared what appeared to be screenshots of the changes, including a menu button asking users to confirm their age and links to the updated privacy policy and training data help page.The Garante said in a statement that it “welcomes the measures OpenAI implemented” and urged the company to comply with two other demands for an age-verification system and a publicity campaign informing Italians about the backstory and their right to opt out of data processing.
Meanwhile, a new study indicates that there is at least one group of workers who will probably not be replaced by ChatGPT: Accountants.
Adept at storytelling, behavioral learning and other creative tasks, artificial intelligence language model ChatGPT – the fastest-growing and most prominent AI platform to date – has raised concerns over its capacity to help students cheat on coursework and exam material. The bot has passed the bar exam with a score in the 90th percentile, passed 13 of 15 AP exams, and attained a near-perfect score on the GRE.”When this technology first came out, everyone was worried that students could now use it to cheat,” Brigham Young University accounting professor David Wood noted. “But opportunities to cheat have always existed. So for us, we’re trying to focus on what we can do with this technology now that we couldn’t do before to improve the teaching process for faculty and the learning process for students. Testing it out was eye-opening.”However, as a study led by Wood later found, the platform often struggles to understand mathematical processes, and often embellishes data to cover up mistakes when they occur.
I will simply note that embellishing data and covering-up mistakes are part and parcel with what passes for today’s journalism.
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