Replika virtual companion ban: Sexting chatbot ban points to looming battle over AI rules

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Users of the Replika "virtual companion" just wanted company. Some of them wanted romantic relationships, sex chat, or even racy pictures of their chatbot.

But late last year users started to complain that the bot was coming on too strong with explicit texts and images -- sexual harassment, some alleged.

Regulators in Italy did not like what they saw and last week barred the firm from gathering data after finding breaches of Europe's massive data protection law, the GDPR.

The company behind Replika has not publicly commented and did not reply to AFP's messages.

The General Data Protection Regulation is the bane of big tech firms, whose repeated rule breaches have landed them with billions of dollars in fines, and the Italian decision suggests it could still be a potent foe for the latest generation of chatbots.

Replika was trained on an in-house version of a GPT-3 model borrowed from OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT bot, which uses vast troves of data from the internet in algorithms that then generate unique responses to user queries.

These bots and the so-called generative AI that underpins them promise to revolutionise internet search and much more.

But experts warn that there is plenty for regulators to be worried about, particularly when the bots get so good that it becomes impossible to tell them apart from humans.

- 'High tension' -

Right now, the European Union is the centre for discussions on regulation of these new bots -- its AI Act has been grinding through the corridors of power for many months and could be finalised this year.

But the GDPR already obliges firms to justify the way they handle data, and AI models are very much on the radar of Europe's regulators.

"We have seen that ChatGPT