UK watchdog warns chatbot developers over data protection laws

Britain's data watchdog has issued a warning to tech firms about the use of people's personal information to develop chatbots after concerns that the underlying technology is trained on large quantities of unfiltered material scraped from the web. The intervention from the Information Commissioner's Office came after its Italian counterpart temporarily banned ChatGPT over data privacy concerns. The ICO said firms developing and using chatbots must respect people's privacy when building generative artificial intelligence systems. ChatGPT, the best-known example of generative AI, is based on a system called a large language model (LLM) that is "trained" by being fed a vast trove of data culled from the internet. "There really can be no excuse for getting the privacy implications of generative AI wrong. We'll be working hard to make sure that organisations get it right," said Stephen Almond, the ICO's director of technology and innovation.