The Federal Trade Commission is looking to create rules to prevent what it suspects is intentional propagandization by AI chatbots.
The FTC declared, “As the proposed policy statement explains, the FTC Act prohibits businesses from engaging in ‘unfair or deceptive’ conduct. The proposed statement goes on to describe how AI companies that distort their systems’ outputs to achieve undisclosed ideological objectives could be deceiving consumers in violation Section 5 of the FTC Act. Such conduct, it explains, may be at odds with explicit and implicit representations made to consumers about the effectiveness and suitability of AI systems for various tasks.”
Chilling Political Dissent: Are LLMs Censoring Output Criticizing Restrictive Regimes? | American Enterprise Institute– www.aei.org
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EXCERPT:
In July, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sought public comment about its proposed policy statement addressing the Commission’s concern that artificial intelligence companies train large language models (LLMs) to “surreptitiously . . . produce ideologically motivated distortions in a response to a factual question.” That same month, Meta’s Oversight Board published a fact-specific research report revealing a different yet real problem—one on an international scale—about LLM output: censorship of content “criticiz[ing] political regimes that restrict free expression.”
Unlike the FTC’s speculative, nefarious-businesses premise that “AI companies . . . [may] distort their systems’ outputs to achieve undisclosed ideological objectives” that don’t match an amorphous understanding of “consumers’ reasonable expectations,” Meta’s Oversight Board admits it “cannot determine the causes of the associations that emerged between declining to generate politically critical material and national legal restrictions on criticism.” The Board’s findings merit serious attention by free-speech advocates everywhere because, as the report notes, “there is a real and concerning risk that foundation models could be reflecting and further entrenching the restrictive speech norms of repressive regimes.”