Office of the Privacy Commissioner Releases Nine Principles for Generative AI

  • 04 janvier 2024
  • Roland Hung, Torkin Manes LLP

Introduction

On December 7, 2023, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (“OPC”) released an article with nine principles intended to guide developers, providers and organizations to properly navigate the development and use of generative artificial intelligence (“AI”). Generative AI, commonly known to the public through systems such as ChatGPT, is a rapidly evolving technology using machine learning to create content (such as text, computer code, images, video, or audio).  Privacy concerns arises where the AI is trained on data sets that include personal information.

Currently, Canada lacks any AI-specific legislation. Under Bill C-27, which introduces sweeping privacy reforms, the proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (“AIDA”) hopes to fill that gap. Until its enactment, generative AI systems remain unregulated. While systems such as ChatGPT may seem innovative and useful, critics have decried it for its “web scraping” function, which extracts data from any source with a human-readable output. ChatGPT also raises the issue of using personal information without consent.

With these concerns in mind, let’s take a look at the nine principles, as follows.