Following the announcement of its artificial intelligence (AI) action plan on May 16, 2023, the French Data Protection Authority (“CNIL”) published on July 28, 2023 a call for contributions from players involved in AI, in order to better understand the sector and its challenges with regard to data privacy.

Given the rise of many new players and the increasingly widespread use of AI, as well as the growing success of generative systems in particular, the CNIL wishes to take concrete action to better regulate the subject. Therefore, the main focus of this initiative is on generative AI, and its creation, development, training and maintenance models.

With this initiative, the CNIL is also anticipating the implementation of the future legal framework applicable to AI systems, including the future AI Act. The CNIL already published several recommendations and guidelines on the subject, and now wishes to further develop the subject to draw up its position as the most appropriate authority to be designated as a supervisory authority under the forthcoming AI Act.

All stakeholders - including private and public actors – are invited to respond to a questionnaire proposed by the CNIL which aims to address the following key areas:

• Conceivable purposes;

• The state-of-the-art in data minimization, selection and retention;

• Implementation of privacy by design and by default from the early stages of AI development;

• Legal bases and criteria to consider when the legitimate interest may be applicable for AI model database collection and training.

Contributors are rather free the develop their answers to the questionnaire, can also go beyond the questionnaire or only answer part of the questionnaire. The CNIL encourages concrete examples from their AI experiences. This is a valuable opportunity for the regulator to gain a better understanding of the challenges facing the sector, and to reconcile operational needs with compliance with applicable law.

We encourage all industry players and stakeholders to take part in this initiative launched by the CNIL, and to respond to this questionnaire to participate in the elaboration of the CNIL doctrine on generative AI. The CNIL does not specify the duration of this call for contributions, but specifies that the aim is to provide food for thought, ahead of publications during the autumn. Therefore, we believe it will probably be closed after the summer season.