Chatbots and the Online Safety Act: Ofcom’s open letter

Earlier this month, Ofcom published an open letter to online service providers, clarifying how the Online Safety Act (OSA) will apply to Generative AI, particularly chatbots. This is the first time Ofcom has published guidance on how the OSA interacts with Generative AI and is welcome clarification in a complex sector.

How does the OSA regulate Generative AI?

The open letter confirmed the following use cases will fall within the scope of the OSA:

• Sharing AI created content with others: where users share content such as text, images or videos generated by a chatbot with other users, including services with group chat functionality.
• Creating chatbots: where a service allows users to upload or create their own Generative AI chatbots that are made available to other users.
• Search services: where an AI tool enables the search of more than one website/database, this will be considered a ‘search service’ under the OSA, including tools that facilitate the delivery of search results on an existing search engine.

My organisation offers one of the above use cases through Generative AI. What should I do?

The OSA imposes several duties, including completing by March 2025 an illegal harms risk assessment.

Generally, risk assessments should be undertaken to understand the risk of harmful content, how to mitigate those risks, what measures can be implemented to reduce the risk and how to manage the risk as it develops. Users should be empowered to report illegal material, particularly those harmful to children.

Ofcom also included the following measures, amongst others, in its draft Code of Practice (these are subject to change):

• assigning an individual responsible for compliance with the OSA;
• implementing a content moderation function that identifies and removes harmful content, and ensuring such function is well resourced and well trained; and
• implementing age verification systems.

If you have any questions on your legal obligations when deploying Generative AI products or would like to discuss how you can comply with the OSA, please contact one of our Technology law experts.