FTC to enforce law to reign in the dangers of AI

Image credit : New York Post According to Chair Lina Khan's op-ed in the New York Times on Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission is on high alert for potential ways that quickly developing artificial intelligence could be used to break the antitrust and consumer protection laws it is tasked with enforcing. “Although these tools are novel, they are not exempt from existing rules, and the F.T.C. will vigorously enforce the laws we are charged with administering, even in this new market,” Khan wrote, echoing a theme the agency shared in a joint statement with three other enforcers last week. In the opinion piece, Khan outlined a number of potential uses for AI that she feels federal regulators should be on the lookout for. Additionally, she made a comparison between the current inflection point in AI and the earlier mid-2000s tech era, when companies like Facebook and Google came to fundamentally alter communications, but with significant implications for data privacy that weren't fully realized for years. [caption id="attachment_169030" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Image credit : KDC Resource[/caption] “What began as a revolutionary set of technologies ended up concentrating enormous private power over key services and locking in business models that come at extraordinary cost to our privacy and security,” Khan wrote. But, she said, “The trajectory of the Web 2.0 era was not inevitable — it was instead shaped by a broad range of policy choices. And we now face another moment of choice. As the use of A.I. becomes more widespread, public officials have a responsibility to ensure this hard-learned history doesn’t repeat itself.”