A scorching potato: At the moment, the AI trade is the Wild West. There are only a few legal guidelines on the books that govern the market. This lack of formal regulation has led to AI companies working on the consideration system, promising to successfully self-regulate, however democrats within the US Senate imagine the self-regulation experiment has failed. They’re now asking commerce regulators to see if they’ll discover any antitrust violations, particularly in AI-generated content material summaries.
A number of Senate Democrats have urged the Federal Commerce Fee and Justice Division to look at whether or not AI-powered options like Google’s AI Overviews violate antitrust legal guidelines. The coalition, led by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, penned a letter to the FTC and DoJ, saying that we’ve already seen consolidation and layoffs within the content material creation sector, and AI instruments like these are making it worse.
In the meantime, big companies like Google and Meta generate profits hand-over-fist in promoting whereas concurrently siphoning articles to coach their AI fashions.
“Dominant on-line platforms, similar to Google and Meta, generate billions of {dollars} per 12 months in promoting income from information and different authentic content material created by others,” the letter reads. “New generative AI options threaten to exacerbate these issues.”
Whereas on the floor, the problem appears extra associated to copyright than antitrust, Klobuchar and her allies level out that AI-generated summaries on search outcomes pages maintain customers targeted on the search web page quite than going to learn the article the AI is summarizing, or in lots of circumstances, is plagiarizing.
The basis concern is that the few giant companies producing AI have created an oligopoly that hurts shoppers, small corporations, information shops, and blogs whereas stealing their content material to refine giant language fashions. The one resolution these tech giants provide is for web site holders to decide out of indexing. The senators imagine this example quantities to unlawful exclusionary conduct.
But, it’s not so easy. For this investigation to have wheels, the FTC should show that AI corporations have “overwhelming market energy” and are utilizing it in a manner that violates present commerce legal guidelines. For the reason that AI trade continues to be in its infancy, only a few legal guidelines are on the books to manage it. In different phrases, no matter whether or not what AI corporations are doing is unfair or unethical, it is all completely authorized.
Nevertheless, that could be the entire level. TechCrunch notes that the Senate’s actions may very well be a “prelude” to introducing new laws. If the FTC can not discover any transgressions, it opens the door for Congress to take motion. It creates a “paper path” exhibiting that the Senate tried to resolve the problem by regulators earlier than developing with a brand new legislative resolution.
Picture credit score: Nick Youngson, Gage Skidmore
