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Keep your AI claims in check

ftc.gov

51–60 of 308 posts

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#51

> If something goes wrong – maybe it fails or yields biased results – you can’t just blame a third-party developer of the technology. Implicit shoutout to all the “slap a front end on ChatGPT” products out there.

[deleted]

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#52

“It’s an ambiguous term with many possible definitions.” “Does the product actually use AI at all? If you think you can get away with baseless claims…” Last I checked basic optimization techniques like simulated annealing and gradient descent - as well as a host of basic statistical tools - are standard parts of an introductory AI textbook. I’ve been on the receiving end of government agency enforcement (SEC) and it…

Yeah, it's pretty laughable that the source they link to for those "possible definitions" right away says this:

> AI is defined in many ways and often in broad terms. The variations stem in part from whether one sees it as a discipline (e.g., a branch of computer science), a concept (e.g., computers performing tasks in ways that simulate human cognition), a set of infrastructures (e.g., the data and computational power needed to train AI systems), or the resulting applications and tools. In a broader sense, it may depend on who is defining it for whom, and who has the power to do so.

I don't see how they can possibly enforce "if it doesn't have AI, it's false advertising to say it does" when they cannot define AI. "I'll know it when I see it" is truly an irksome thorn.

Deterministic if/then statements simulate a surprising coverage of average human cognition, so who's to say a program comprised of them is neither artificial nor intelligent? (That's hand-waving over the more mathematical fact that even the most advanced AI of today is all just branching logic in the end. It just happens to have been automatically generated through a convoluted process that we call "training" resulting in complicated conditions for each binary decision).

In general I like the other bullet points, but I find it really bizarre they'd run with this one.

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#54
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If claims are made, those claims must be verifiable... Same as eg. for medication, snake oil much?

"Source code" is awfully close to a "recipe", and I'd very much like for actual ingredients to be verified by a trustworthy source if needed.

[deleted]

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#55

“It’s an ambiguous term with many possible definitions.” “Does the product actually use AI at all? If you think you can get away with baseless claims…” Last I checked basic optimization techniques like simulated annealing and gradient descent - as well as a host of basic statistical tools - are standard parts of an introductory AI textbook. I’ve been on the receiving end of government agency enforcement (SEC) and it…

To be fair, what they mean is the way marketers and advertisers use "AI". Which is often without regard for any specifics.

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#56
post #43
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignorance of your "black box" excuses not

> Ignorance of your "black box" excuses not Hopefully the FTC understands linear separability. Because I often get the impression that people who want ML models to be explicable don’t, and are expecting the mathematically impossible.

If the system your building is "mathematically impossible" to explain in a way that would be expected of every other system. Maybe you shouldn't be building that system.

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#58
I would like to know how others are dealing with this. I am making a public health system and to deal with this I simply show results to the clinician or social worker etc... and have them manually approve the result before its applied to an end users protocol.

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#59

How are the companies of tomorrow supposed to innovate when they’re strangled by behaving responsibly??

it hasn't been a problem for the social platforms or other companies operating in the hovering of personal data for profit. the trick is to get too big to fail status before gov't agencies can come shut you down.

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#60

The FTC shouldn't be threatening citizens and companies in random blog posts. It's inappropriate. The FTC appears to have some serious problems at the moment.

Isn’t it their purpose to set the boundaries ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission

The first section is a decent summary.

Blog posts making casual threats about AI claims is a long way from appropriate. There are places for formality, and the law is one of them. There are serious people quitting the FTC over current leadership, claiming they engaged in behavior that is wildly overstepping their legal authority.

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