The US Federal Trade Commission will examine the rise of AI technology on all fronts, FTC Chair Lina Khan said, speaking at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Washington, DC, on Tuesday. But the agency’s goal isn’t to crush startups aiming to compete in this highly regulated space, Khan said.
“We want to make sure that the trade arteries are open, the trade routes are open, and if you have a good idea, if you’re able to commercialize it — if there’s market interest — that you have a fair shot at the competition,” Khan said. to the audience. “Your fate is tied to the strength of your idea about your business’s talent, rather than whether you threaten one of the greats who could prevent you.”
However, the FTC is not ignorant of the technology or its potential harms. In fact, there is already an increase in consumer complaint cases in some areas, such as voice-cloning fraud, Khan said.
This type of technology recently made headlines as OpenAI released and then pulled a ChatGPT voice that resembled actress Scarlett Johansson, who famously voiced the AI in the movie “Her.” The actress claims she declined OpenAI’s offer to record her voice for the chatbot, so she cloned it. (OpenAI claims it just used a different voice actress.)
Asked what areas of AI the FTC was monitoring, Khan explained that it was everything.
“We’re really looking across the stack — so from the tokens in the cloud, to the models, to the downstream applications — to try to understand what’s going on at each of those levels,” he said. In addition, the organization is looking to hear from those “on the ground” about what they see as both the opportunities and the risks.
Of course, AI policing comes with its challenges, despite the number of technologists the FTC has hired to help in this area. Khan noted that the agency received north of 600 applications from technologists seeking employment at the FTC, but did not say how many of those had actually been hired. Overall, however, the agency has about 1,300 people, he said, 400 fewer people than it had in the 1980s, even though the economy has grown 15 times as much.
With dozens of antitrust cases and nearly a hundred on the consumer protection side, the agency is now turning to innovative tactics to help it fight fraud, particularly in the AI space.
For example, Khan mentioned the agency recent voice cloning challenge where he invited the market and the public to submit ideas on how an agency like the FTC could detect and track in more real-time whether a phone call or voice is real or if it is using voice cloning for fraudulent purposes. In addition to procuring profitable ideas from challenges like this, the FTC also hopes to push the market to focus on developing more mechanisms to combat AI fraud.
Another area of focus for the FTC is focusing on what openness really means in the context of artificial intelligence, Khan explained. “How do we make sure it’s not just a branding exercise, but when you look at the terms it’s really open?” he asked, adding that the service wanted to move on from some of those “open first, close later” dynamics previously seen in the Web 2.0 era.
“I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned, in general, but I think especially right now, as we’re thinking about some of these AI tools, it’s a good time to apply them,” Khan said.
In addition, the organization is ready to monitor the industry for AI hype, where the value of the product is overstated. “Some of these AI tools we believe are being used to market, and to inflate and exaggerate, the value of what can be offered. And so we want to make sure we police that,” Khan noted. “We’ve already released a few cases of AI/misleading advertising — and it’s an area we continue to scrutinize.”
