The main purpose of the article was to indicate the growing importance of the issue of determi-nants of the development of applications of generative artificial intelligence with particular atten-tion to the issues of current and potential threats to this development and also the necessity of legal regulation of this development. On the one hand, the development of artificial intelligence is a kind of next stage of the ongoing technological progress, which has been taking place since the first industrial revolution, consisting in the increase in the scale of objectification of labor and automation of manufacturing processes. On the other hand, taking into account the ChatGPT, which is made available in open access on the Internet, this development of generative artificial intelligence also generates many risks related to the potentially rapid development of disinfor-mation in social media, non-compliance with copyright, the decreasing possibility of identifying the authorship of works created by artificial intelligence, and the use of artificial intelligence by hackers and cybercriminals to create new cybercrime techniques, and so on. In this regard, it is necessary to regulate the development of applications of generative artificial intelligence technol-ogy, so that this development does not generate negative consequences and new categories of threats.