The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will examine the rise of AI technology across all fronts, said FTC Chair Lina Khan, speaking at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. Nonetheless, the agency’s goal isn’t to crush the startups which are aiming to compete on this space with increased regulation, Khan said.
“We wish to ensure that the arteries of commerce are open, that the pathways of commerce are open, and if you may have idea, if you happen to’re capable of commercialize it — if there’s interest within the marketplace — that you may have a good shot at competing,” Khan told the audience. “Your fate is tied to the strength of your idea on what you are promoting talent, quite than whether you’re threatening one among the massive guys who could stomp you out.”
Still, the FTC isn’t ignoring the technology or its potential harms. In reality, it’s already seeing an uptick in consumer criticism cases in some areas, like voice-cloning fraud, Khan said.
That form of technology recently made headlines as OpenAI released then pulled a ChatGPT voice that gave the impression of actress Scarlett Johansson, who famously voiced the AI within the movie “Her.” The actress claims she refused OpenAI’s offer to record her voice for the chatbot, so it cloned her as an alternative. (OpenAI claims it simply used one other voice actress.)
Asked which areas of AI the FTC was watching, Khan explained that it was every little thing.
“We’re really looking across the stack — so from the chips to the cloud, to the models, to the downstream apps — to try to know what’s happening in each of those layers,” she said. Plus, the agency is seeking to hear from “folks on the bottom” about what they see as each the opportunities and the risks.
In fact, policing AI comes with its challenges, despite the variety of technologists the FTC has hired to assist in this area. Khan noted the organization received north of 600 applications from technologists searching for work on the FTC but didn’t say how lots of those were actually hired. In total, though, the agency has around 1,300 people, she said, which is 400 people fewer people than it had within the Eighties, though the economy has grown 15 times over.
With dozens of antitrust cases and shut to 100 on the buyer protection side, the agency is now turning to progressive tactics to assist it fight fraud, particularly within the AI space.
For instance, Khan mentioned the agency’s recent voice-cloning challenge where it invited the market and the general public to submit ideas as to how an agency just like the FTC would have the option to detect and monitor in a more real-time way whether a phone call or voice is real, or if it’s using voice cloning for fraudulent purposes. Along with sourcing winning ideas from challenges like this, the FTC hopes to also spur the marketplace to deal with developing more mechanisms to fight AI fraud.
One other area of focus for the FTC is the deal with what openness really means within the AI context, Khan explained. “How will we ensure it’s not only a branding exercise, but once you take a look at the terms it’s truly open?” she asked, adding that the agency desired to get ahead of a few of those “open first, closed later” dynamics that were previously seen within the Web 2.0 era.
“I believe there’s just a number of lessons to be learned, generally, but I believe especially this moment, as we’re fascinated about a few of these AI tools, is a really right moment to be applying them,” Khan said.
As well as, the agency is poised to look at the industry for AI hype, where the worth of the product is being overstated. “A few of these AI tools we predict are getting used to market, and to form of inflate and exaggerate, the worth of what could also be offered. And so we wish to ensure that we’re policing that,” Khan noted. “We’ve already had a few AI hype/deceptive promoting cases come out — and it’s an area we’re continuing to scrutinize.”
