FTC Chair Lina Khan shares how the agency is looking at AI | TechCrunch

The US Federal Trade Commission will investigate the rise of AI technology on all fronts, said FTC Chair Lina Khan, speaking at TechCrunch’s Strictly VC event in Washington DC on Tuesday. However, the agency’s goal is not to crush startups that are aiming to compete in the sector with increased regulation, Khan said.

“We want to make sure that the arteries of commerce remain open, the avenues of commerce remain open, and that if you have a good idea, if you are able to commercialize it – if there is interest in the marketplace – you have a fair chance to compete,” Khan told the audience. “Your fate is tied to the strength of your idea and your business ingenuity, not whether you are bullying some big guy who can trample you.”

Still, the FTC isn’t ignoring the technology or its potential harms. In fact, some areas, such as voice cloning fraud, are already seeing an increase in consumer complaint cases, Khan said.

This type of technology made headlines recently, when OpenAI released a ChatGPT voice, which was later removed. looked like actress Scarlett Johanssonwho voiced the AI ​​in the movie “Her.” The actress claims she declined OpenAI’s offer to record her voice for the chatbot, so it cloned her instead. (OpenAI claims it simply used another voice actress.)

When asked what areas of AI the FTC is looking at, Khan said it’s everything.

He added, “We’re really looking across the stack — that is, from chips to the cloud, from models to downstream apps — to try to understand what’s going on at each of these layers.” Also, the agency wants to hear from “people on the ground” about what they see as opportunities and risks.

Of course, monitoring AI comes with its own challenges, even though the FTC has hired many technologists to help in this area. Khan reported that the organization received more than 600 applications from technologists interested in working at the FTC, but he did not say how many of them were actually hired. However, overall, the agency has about 1,300 people, he said, which is 400 people fewer than it had in the 1980s, even though the economy has grown 15 times.

With dozens of antitrust cases and nearly a hundred consumer protection cases on its plate, the agency is now turning to innovative strategies to help fight fraud, particularly in the AI ​​space.

For example, Khan mentioned the agency. Recent voice cloning challenge Where it invited the market and the public to submit ideas about how an agency like the FTC would be able to detect and monitor in more real-time whether a phone call or voice is genuine, or whether it is using voice cloning for fraudulent purposes. In addition to getting winning ideas from challenges like this, the FTC hopes to spur the market to focus on developing more mechanisms to fight AI fraud.

Khan explained that another area of ​​focus for the FTC is to focus on what openness really means in the AI ​​context. “How do we make sure that this is not just a branding exercise, but that when you look at the terms, it is truly open?” he asked. He said the agency wanted to get beyond some of the “open first, close later” dynamics previously seen in the Web 2.0 era.

“I think there’s a lot to learn in general, but I think this moment in particular, when we’re thinking about some of these AI tools, is a very perfect time to implement them,” Khan said.

In addition, the agency is set to monitor AI hype in the industry, where the value of the product is being overstated. “We think some of these AI tools are being used to market and overstate the value of what they can offer. And so we want to make sure we keep an eye on that,” Khan said. “We’ve already had a few cases of AI hype/deceptive advertising come to us – and that’s an area we’re constantly investigating.”