2023-07-13 19:04:12
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched an investigation into the American company OpenAI, the developer of the chat bot ChatGPT, writes The Washington Post.
The FTC, which has repeatedly warned that consumer protection laws apply to AI products, has sent a 20-page request to OpenAI for data on how the company is addressing the risks associated with its AI models.
The agency, the newspaper notes, is interested in whether OpenAI engaged in unfair or misleading actions that led to “reputational damage” to consumers. For example, the FTC has requested a detailed description of all user complaints it has received about its products regarding false, misleading, or malicious claims about people.
In addition, the regulator is awaiting a report on the March incident, when individual users, due to a bug in OpenAI systems, saw payment information and data from other people’s chat history.
The publication notes that the new investigation will be the most serious threat to OpenAI from the authorities, while the newspaper itself calls the FTC “the government’s main policeman in Silicon Valley”, recalling that the agency has already imposed large fines, for example on Amazon and Twitter. If the regulator considers that the ChatGPT developer has violated consumer protection laws, then in addition to a fine, it can order it to change the approach to processing user data.
ChatGPT was previously temporarily restricted in Italy, but has been restored after the developers agreed to add an age verification feature, as well as allow European users to block their information from being used to train an AI model.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a chatbot capable of generating texts, writing codes and answering questions, last November. After that, many large corporations began to announce plans to introduce AI technologies into their products and present their alternatives to ChatGPT. In April, for example, Alibaba Group introduced the Tongyi Qianwen generative AI model for enterprise communication, e-commerce, web search, and more.
Yesterday, July 12, American billionaire Elon Musk (co-founder of OpenAI, who left the project in 2018) announced the launch of a new AI company called xAI. The startup declared its goal to “understand the true nature of the universe.”
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