The EU's decision to regulate ChatGPT as a search engine will make sense to those who use it as one. But what if you use it as a friend? Or to have a chat about the upcoming election?
Those are among the multitude of new questions that the advent of generative AI poses for European regulators — who, experts say, have yet to find sufficient answers. The EU executive on Monday designated ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine under the Digital Services Act, imposing a range of transparency and risk-mitigation obligations similar to those faced by traditional search leaders like Google and Microsoft’s Bing, which exceed 45 million monthly users. ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, risks fines of up to 6% of its annual global revenue if it fails to meet these requirements.
Still, the designation is narrow and applies only to the parts of the tool that act as a search engine, meaning conversations in which the chatbot adds its own input don't appear to be covered. Under the DSA, the Commission could instead have opted to categorize ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Platform, a designation that usually applies to social media and e-commerce and imposes different obligations. Yet neither category corresponds to the range of uses that chatbots offer.
She pointed to risks to children, "such as emotional dependency and manipulative or addictive design,” urging the Commission to clarify how they are covered by existing rules. ChatGPT and its peers have been the subject of global controversy for allegedly contributing to the tragic suicides of teenagers, including 16-year-old Adam Raine of California, whose parents have sued the company. Therapy and companionship are hardly fringe use cases for AI chatbots; as many as 60 percent of adults globally use them for therapy, one recent insurance industry study found.
The current digital services law, finalized in 2022, did not foresee the boom in chatbots. João Pedro Quintais, associate law professor at the University of Amsterdam, describes ChatGPT as "a hybrid” technology that has the functions of both a search engine and online platforms, as well as others closer to those of a publisher of its own content. The “search engine” designation may limit the Commission's ability to supervise how ChatGPT handles risks not only to teens' mental health, but also to election integrity or illegal content.
Asking ChatGPT to name the candidates in a local election should now be covered under the DSA. Instead, a conversation between a user and a chatbot about who to vote for, where misinformation could come out, may not be. The chatbot’s designation took just under a year for the Commission to conclude, with questions around which bucket to put it in stumping the bureaucrats.
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