European consumer protection bodies urged to investigate ChatGPT, others

The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) has joined the chorus of concerns about ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots, calling on EU consumer protection agencies to investigate the technology and the potential harm to individuals.

The growing popularity of Microsoft-backed Open AI's ChatGPT, which can mimic humans and create text and images based on prompts, has spurred others such as Alphabet's Google, Amazon's cloud division AWS and Meta Platforms to announce similar tools.

BEUC, the umbrella group for 46 consumer organisations from 32 countries, set out its worries in separate letters earlier this month to the network of consumer safety authorities (CSN network) and to the network of consumer protection authorities (CPC network).


The lobby group said content produced by the chatbots which appears true and reliable but is often factually incorrect, can mislead consumers and also result in deceptive advertising. It said younger consumers and children are more vulnerable to such risks.

"BEUC thus asks you to investigate the risks that these AI systems pose to consumers as a matter of urgency, to identify their presence in consumer markets and to explore what remedial action must be taken to avoid consumer harm," BEUC Deputy Director General Ursula Pachl wrote in the letter to the CPC network and the European Commission.

The group also called on the Consumer Safety Network to start an exchange of information and an investigation into the safety risks of these products.

Musk, others write open letter

Last month, Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives called for a six-month pause in training systems more powerful than OpenAI's newly launched model GPT-4, they said in an open letter, citing potential risks to society and humanity.

The letter, issued by the non-profit Future of Life Institute and signed by more than 1,000 people including Musk, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, researchers at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, as well as AI heavyweights Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, called for a pause on advanced AI development until shared safety protocols for such designs were developed, implemented and audited by independent experts.

"Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable," the letter said.

The letter also detailed potential risks to society and civilization by human-competitive AI systems in the form of economic and political disruptions, and called on developers to work with policymakers on governance and regulatory authorities.