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Keep your AI claims in check

ftc.gov

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Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#82
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.

I rather think that they (the regulators) are saying that you can’t expect to use mathematical impossibility as a legal argument to avoid liability if your AI does material harm.

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#83
Thoughts:

- Yay, in spirit.

- I already have an “AI” toothbrush. If that’s the bar, it’s not high. If the bar is different for Oral B because they’re big, that’s bad.

- Diluting or fuzzying useful terms (like “crypto”) is bad. (Why should I change, they’re the ones who suck).

- Inventing new terms, like “smart” and “Big Data” is actually positive, because they are easy to translate to their actual semantics (woo woo and gimmick).

Personally, I already assume AI = mumbo jumbo (unless proven otherwise), but I can see how it’s annoying for people working in the field.

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#84
post #68

We are working on an AI product in a highly regulated industry (Investing). Recently we have been experimenting using the GPT3 API as a Junior Equity Analyst. On an eyeball check the results of the technology are impressive. The problem is that there is no way to validate the feedback on scale. I.e., we can't receive statistics about the feedback from the API. In contrast, for our own Entity Recognition models we can…

[flagged]

It is a regulated industry. Compliance exists for a reason. As we have seen during the crypto fallout... ^-^

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#85
post #41

“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…

I think we can safely assume techniques with analytical solutions computable in polynomial time are neither ML nor AI. Linear regression is an important part of statistics but is still ultimately a couple matmuls and a matrix inversion in its basic form.

A good amount of what gets into an ML or AI course, or book, is a couple matmuls and inversion.

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#86

“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…

While I don't disagree with the basic premise ("AI" as a specific falsifiable term is hard to pin down due to the ubiquity associated with the term); I do think there are specific cut-and-dry circumstances where the FTC could falsifiably prove your product does not include AI.

For example, using an alternative of Amazon's Mechanical Turk to process data is clearly a case where your product does not use AI. Which I believe is more likely the kind of scenario envisioned when the author was writing that sentence.

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#87

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.

FTC is a regulator whose "principal mission is the enforcement of civil (non-criminal) antitrust law".

So it is completely fine for them to remind citizens and companies of their obligations.

Especially given in the AI space there is so much questionable behaviour going on.

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#88

This is fascinating, it’s a bit refreshing to see plain text for normal people. I can’t be the only person with extreme anxiety reading Sam Altman’s twitter and wondering if my career choice was the wrong one some days. It would be nice to see if this FTC post tamps down that hype machine?

> reading Sam Altman’s twitter

He has made a pronounced and clear shift to a “thought leader” account after the OpenAI-MS investment.

That can only mean that OpenAI is dying.

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#89

This reeks of anticompetitive regulatory capture after Google dropped the ball on AI-enabled search.

Google already is AI-enabled search. And it's questionable whether that GPT sidebar feature is even worth it or not given how inaccurate it is.

That is extremely disingenuous. Google search is absolutely not AI-enabled in the same manner that ChatGPT and Phind are, and all of their attempts to develop that sort of functionality have crashed and burned.

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#90

“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 pow…

As you say - any computer program could be considered "AI". It's so ill defined that making the claim doesn't even mean anything.

The FTC is going to get hammered in a court if they ever try to test this.

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