On Italy's GPT-4 "Ban"

The Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante Per La Protezione Dei Dati Personali, or GPDP) has imposed an (I quote the official English translation of its statement on its web site) "immediate temporary limitation" on GPT-4.

According to the Authority's own statement (which you can see in the original, and in English translation, at its own web site, here) the action has nothing to do with the fears of AI-out-of-control of which so much is now being made. Rather the GPDP cites the more commonplace Internet regulation concerns of the protection of user privacy ("no information is provided to users and data subjects whose data are collected by Open AI; more importantly, there appears to be no legal basis underpinning the massive collection and processing of personal data in order to 'train' the algorithms on which the platform relies"), and the fear that children will be subjected to inappropriate content ("the lack of . . . age verification mechanism expos[ing] children to receiving responses that are absolutely inappropriate to their age and awareness").

One may speculate that these stated concerns do not exhaust the GPDP's concerns about the technology--and even that other concerns may actually be of higher priority than the ones stated. Still, that these are the ones presented is a reminder that, in what can seem a silly rush to see the release of GPT-4 as a bad sci-fi "rebellion of the robots" scenario, we may be overlooking humbler but quite important concerns--the more in as so much is being made of some of these exact concerns in relation to other technologies.