Irish Knowledge Safety Fee Probes Google’s AI Mannequin

The Irish data regulator launched an investigation to determine Google’s compliance with a European privacy law when it was developing its PaLM 2 artificial intelligence model.

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The Knowledge Safety Fee on Thursday said it’s probing whether or not Google assessed privateness dangers forward of growing the Pathways Language Mannequin.

Google launched the multilingual generative AI mannequin final yr. The mannequin is provided with reasoning and coding capacities and is embedded in 25 Google merchandise.

Below the Normal Knowledge Safety Regulation, firms growing know-how with doubtlessly “excessive threat to the rights and freedoms of pure individuals” are required to conduct a knowledge safety affect evaluation. When the businesses establish dangers, they’re obliged to deploy sufficient privateness measures, equivalent to acquiring consumer consent to course of information.

As many synthetic intelligence firms primarily depend on scraped information to coach their AI fashions, regulators fear that AI builders are violating Europeans’ privateness.

The Irish investigation is a part of a broader effort from the European information regulators to establish potential privateness malpractices of AI builders, the DPC mentioned Thursday. Social media large Meta in June postponed the launch of its AI methods skilled with information taken from European Instagram and Fb customers weeks after a rights group lodged a grievance towards the corporate with 11 European information regulators (see: Meta’s AI Model Training Comes Under European Scrutiny).

The Irish regulator has additionally clashed with X, previously Twitter, over its use of tweets to coach the corporate’s Grok chatbot (see: Breach Roundup: Irish DPC Ends Case Against GrokAI).

Google didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.