FTC Chair Lina Khan says she is going to ‘not hesitate to crack down’ on shady AI enterprise conduct

FTC Chair Lina Khan joined prime officers from U.S. civil rights and shopper safety companies to place companies on discover that regulators are working to trace and cease unlawful conduct within the use and improvement of biased or misleading AI instruments.

A lot of the scrutiny has been on those that deploy automated instruments that amplify bias into choices about who to rent, how employee productiveness is monitored or who will get entry to housing and loans.

However amid a fast-moving race between tech giants comparable to Google and Microsoft in promoting extra superior instruments that generate textual content, photos and different content material resembling the work of people, Khan additionally raised the potential for the FTC wielding its antitrust authority to guard competitors.

“Everyone knows that in moments of technological disruption, established gamers and incumbents could also be tempted to crush, take up or in any other case unlawfully restrain new entrants with the intention to preserve their dominance,” Khan mentioned at a digital press occasion Tuesday. “And we already can see these dangers. A handful of highly effective corporations immediately management the required uncooked supplies, not solely the huge shops of knowledge, but additionally the cloud companies and computing energy that startups and different companies depend on to develop and deploy AI merchandise.”

Khan didn’t title any particular corporations or merchandise however expressed concern about instruments that scammers may use to “manipulate and deceive folks on a big scale, deploying faux or convincing content material extra broadly and concentrating on particular teams with larger precision.”

She added that “if AI instruments are being deployed to interact in unfair, misleading practices or unfair strategies of competitors, the FTC is not going to hesitate to crack down on this illegal conduct.”

Khan was joined by Charlotte Burrows, chair of the Equal Employment Alternative Fee; Rohit Chopra, director of the Shopper Monetary Safety Bureau; and Assistant Legal professional Normal Kristen Clarke, who leads the civil rights division of the Division of Justice.

As lawmakers within the European Union negotiate passage of recent AI guidelines, and a few have referred to as for comparable legal guidelines within the U.S., the highest U.S. regulators emphasised Tuesday that most of the most dangerous AI merchandise may already run afoul of current legal guidelines defending civil rights and stopping fraud.

”There is no such thing as a AI exemption to the legal guidelines on the books,” Khan mentioned.