No, it’s not an April Fools’ joke: OpenAI has started geoblocking access to its generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, in Italy. \nOn the flip side, Italy may have just banned all machine learning by, er, accident… \ud83d\ude2c\n“[T]he Privacy Guarantor notes the lack of information to users and all interested parties whose data is collected by OpenAI but above all the absence of a legal basis that justifies the mass collection and storage of personal data, for the purpose of ‘training’ the algorithms underlying the operation of the platform,” the DPA wrote in its statement today [which we’ve translated from Italian using AI]. \nPenalties for confirmed breaches of the GDPR, meanwhile, can scale up to 4% of a data processor’s annual global turnover (or \u20ac20M, whichever is greater)