Former FTC Advisers: Quick Control Over AI 'Hype' Is Needed

Two former advisers to the Federal Trade Commission want regulators to take swift action to counteract all the "hype" surrounding artificial intelligence (AI).

Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West authored a paper posted by AI Now. The paper calls for FTC regulators to step up their counteroffensive as tech companies compete to build out their AI tools, The Washington Post reported.

The paper calls on the federal officials to quickly take action — including using their antitrust powers — to resolve issues raised by AI, which was helped by OpenAI's ChatGPT tool.

The paper expresses concerns about the dominance of tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

It warns that "a handful of private actors have accrued power and resources that rival nation-states while developing and evangelizing artificial intelligence as critical social infrastructure," the Post said.

"We are already seeing these firms wield their control over necessary resources to throttle competition," the authors wrote.

And they noted in their executive summary of the report: "Artificial intelligence is captivating our attention, generating both fear and awe about what's coming next.

"As increasingly dire prognoses about AI's future trajectory take center stage in the headlines about generative AI, it's time for regulators, and the public, to ensure that there is nothing about artificial intelligence (and the industry that powers it) that we need to accept as given.

"This watershed moment must also swiftly give way to action: to galvanize the considerable energy that has already accumulated over several years towards developing meaningful checks on the trajectory of AI technologies. This must start with confronting the concentration of power in the tech industry.

"Only once we stop seeing AI as synonymous with progress can we establish popular control over the trajectory of these technologies and meaningfully confront their serious social, economic, and political impacts — from exacerbating patterns of inequality in housing, credit, healthcare, and education to inhibiting workers' ability to organize and incentivizing content production that is deleterious to young people's mental and physical health."

Meanwhile, the advanced-language chatbot systems of ChatGPT and GPT-4 have become a real game changer for college students, so much that professors are now worried about the erosion of academic integrity and actual learning in the classroom.

ChatGPT, which launched in November, has already garnered 100 million users. It's an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. It was also built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 and GPT-4 families of large language models.