The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has filed an official complaint with the European Ombudsman against the European Commission after discovering that the Commission used OpenAI's ChatGPT system in public documents, likely violating its own internal guidelines and obligations under the treaties.
The Commission's guidelines for staff explicitly state that "Staff shall never directly replicate the output of a generative AI model in public documents". According to the ICCL, a recent response to an access to documents request revealed that at least one link was generated using OpenAI's ChatGPT. Dr Kris Shrishak, ICCL Enforce Senior Fellow, emphasised that public bodies like the European Commission should always be transparent and disclose if a generative AI tool is used in any public document, even if the output from such tools has been assessed by their staff. Meanwhile, the EU faces pressure to loosen data protection rules to boost AI development – the proposed GDPR amendments within the "digital omnibus" package would introduce new exceptions that make it easier for companies to collect and process personal data, including sensitive information, for AI development and deployment.
Critics argue this undermines citizens' right to good administration and erodes trust in official EU communications at a time when the EU is promoting regulatory leadership on AI. Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German politician who was one of the original GDPR architects, called this a "dramatic" move and asked whether "this is the end of data protection and privacy as we have signed it into the EU treaty and fundamental rights charter". As the EU attempts to balance innovation with rights protection, these developments highlight ongoing tensions around transparency in institutional AI use and the impact of strict data protection rules on economic competitiveness.
Sources:
1. https://www.iccl.ie/news/european-commission-breaches-own-ai-guidelines-by-using-chatgpt-in-public-documents/
2. https://www.politico.eu/article/brussels-knifes-privacy-to-feed-the-ai-boom-gdpr-digital-omnibus/
3. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/eu-bows-pressure-loosening-ai-064437258.html
