That’s the headline.

It’s been a wild week after Elon Musk and other tech figureheads asked for a pause on AI innovation, and we reported on Young Guru raising the alarm on audio deepfakes. This week, the Italian Data Privacy and Security regulator has banned ChatGPT from use in its country.

Italy’s regulator says it will investigate OpenAI and its products, and OpenAI has 20 days to say how it will address the regulator’s concerns or face a $21.7 million fine.

These moves are coming after a wave of AI ethics team firings, Elon Musk asking the industry to pause innovation, and news of a completely fabricated sexual harassment scandal made up by ChatGPT.

It’s an unfortunate product of the very, Wild Wild West beginnings of AI development. Italy’s basis for banning ChatGPT are two fold. There’s no legal basis to justify “the mass collection and storage of personal data for the purpose of ‘training’ algorithms underlying the operation of the platform, and [it] exposes minors to absolutely unsuitable answers compared to their degree of development and awareness.”

Other governments are taking a wait and see approach to understand Italy’s full determination for the ban. Ireland and England’s data privacy protection authorities are waiting to see what happens next.

Meanwhile, companies big and small are rushing to bring new applications to the market. As I’ve said numerous times, we need to have a hand on the shoulder to pause innovation enough to understand what’s actually happening and I’m hopeful public and private partnerships like CEAMLS can lead in that area.

Full disclosure: I’m currently working on new technologies using OpenAI’s GPT-3 an -4 products.