Watch your ‘AI hype,’ feds warn tech corporations

Companies proceed to hype up the methods synthetic intelligence can improve their companies, and the federal government is taking discover.

A Federal Trade Commission lawyer warned corporations Monday in opposition to making deceptive advertising claims about their AI ambitions and merchandise, quipping that companies “don’t need a machine to predict what the FTC might do when those claims are unsupported.”

Michael Atleson, an legal professional with the FTC’s division of promoting practices, wrote in a weblog submit that “some products with AI claims might not even work as advertised in the first place,” including that “for FTC enforcement purposes — false or unsubstantiated claims about a product’s efficacy are our bread and butter.”

His warning comes amid frenzied curiosity in AI on Wall Street and elsewhere, fueled by the surging reputation of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, which ushered in a extra standard understanding of what AI can do and the way it may be harnessed in artistic methods. After Microsoft Corp.
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included that know-how into its Bing search engine in an try and problem Alphabet Inc.’s
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dominant search engine, corporations throughout the spectrum have been leaping on the development in hopes of comparable consideration.

See additionally: Microsoft nonetheless has ‘a mountain to climb’ regardless of AI and ChatGPT efforts

“AI hype is playing out today across many products, from toys to cars to chatbots and a lot of things in between,” Atleson mentioned, noting that advertising performs into that.

The FTC will have a look at various elements in assessing AI-related promoting.

“For example, we’re not yet living in the realm of science fiction, where computers can generally make trustworthy predictions of human behavior,” Atleson wrote. “Your performance claims would be deceptive if they lack scientific support or if they apply only to certain types of users or under certain conditions.”

There’s additionally the nagging sense that many corporations hawking AI endeavors might not even have AI of their merchandise in any respect.

‘If you think you can get away with baseless claims that your product is AI-enabled, think again.’


— Michael Atleson, an legal professional with the FTC’s division of promoting practices

“If you think you can get away with baseless claims that your product is AI-enabled, think again,” Atleson wrote. “In an investigation, FTC technologists and others can look under the hood and analyze other materials to see if what’s inside matches up with your claims.”

In that sense, “merely using an AI tool in the development process is not the same as a product having AI in it.”

Additionally, the FTC will assess claims that AI-powered merchandise are higher than common ones. Companies declare such issues “perhaps to justify a higher price or influence labor decisions,” he famous, however they “need adequate proof for that kind of comparative claim, too, and if such proof is impossible to get, then don’t make the claim.”

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Atleson instructed that corporations could be fast to breathlessly profess the wonders of AI whereas asking for a go if issues go awry.

“If something goes wrong — maybe it fails or yields biased results — you can’t just blame a third-party developer of the technology,” he mentioned. “And you can’t say you’re not responsible because that technology is a ‘black box’ you can’t understand or didn’t know how to test.”

Source web site: www.marketwatch.com

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