What Did OpenAI Do This Week? - 16/07/2023 [+24 LINKS]

OPENAI ‘STRIKE ONE’?

This week, the US Federal Trade Commission served OpenAI with a 20-page Civil Investigate Demand or CID. (A CID is similar to a subpoena, and recipients are legally obliged to produce the information they request).

The subject of its investigation is whether OpenAI has (since June 1, 2020) engaged in ‘unfair or deceptive practices relating to risks of harm to consumers, including reputational harm’ and whether ‘Commission action to obtain monetary relief would be in the public interest.’ It poses 49 detailed questions for the company and requests 17 categories of documents for its investigation. Within its pages, OpenAI is asked to provide detailed descriptions of all complaints it received of its products making “false, misleading, disparaging or harmful” statements about people. It’s also requested to disclose records related to a security incident that the company encountered (and openly resolved) in March when a bug in its systems allowed some users to see payment-related information, as well as some data from other users’ chat history.  Unusually, the content of this CID is in the public domain as it was leaked to The Washington Post, and reported on Thursday. Understandably this news rattled Sam Altman who was keen to share an immediate response.

Media summations of its implications may not have calmed him; “the strongest regulatory threat to the Microsoft-backed start-up yet.” and “the most potent regulatory threat to date to OpenAI’s business in the United States” Indeed, the FTC had issued multiple warnings that existing consumer protection laws apply to AI and the FTC’s demands of OpenAI are the first indication of how it intends to enforce those warnings. If the FTC finds that a company violates consumer protection laws, it can levy fines or put a business under a consent decree, which can dictate how the company handles data. That said there are areas of the CID that some (Adam Kovacevich founder of a centre-left tech industry policy coalition promoting technology’s progressive future) believe the FTC has no jurisdiction to probe.

All of this comes at the end of a week in which Sarah Silverman was famed for her copyright infringement suit against OpenAI and 160,000 Hollywood actors went on strike (with no guarantees from studio/production companies about how AI will be used), joining more than 11,000 members of the Writers Guild of America. Could this be a ‘strike one’ warning for gen AI (and OpenAI) about how far we want AI to change our culture?

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