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Keep your AI claims in check

ftc.gov

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Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#191

Post by tenpies »

dragonwriter wrote: post #135
dylan604 wrote: post #4

wow, i would not have imagined a gov't agency to be agile enough to release something like this. i'm kind of impressed. here's to hoping this isn't just all bark and there's some actual teeth to his.

> wow, i would not have imagined a gov’t agency to be agile enough to release something like this. The FTC is actually pretty good about doing things like this when a wave of similar types of borderline business practices erupt.

Jokes on them, I'll call my AI product Full Self Thinking.

It's $10,000 if you buy now, but we'll be raising prices to $15,000 by June.

And yes, it will just be a worst version of the latest ChatGPT, but I'll hide it in a black box and continually tell you that it's so far ahead of the competition, we can't even see them in the rear view mirror!

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#192

Post by danielmarkbruce »

uoaei wrote: post #186
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Bayesian regression is technically analytical, too, I suppose. Really exposes the blurriness of such a vague term as even "machine learning" let alone "AI". Bayesian regression is often not really considered AI, unless it's incorporated in a more complicated pipeline (e.g. Bayesian optimization). Same goes for linear regression, then: alone it is just a model.

and there are many more things like this. Back in the day "expert systems" were AI. For any given piece of software, it will meet some definition of AI from some time period.

The term AI is about as concrete as "awesome".

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#194

Post by hanniabu »

mr_toad wrote: post #43
calr wrote: 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.

Why bother quoting when it's the entire comment? Never understood that

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#195

Post by jrumbut »

foxes wrote: post #69
pretendgeneer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mathematical explanation is not required in many areas. Perhaps you can’t perfectly explain it but you can at least understand it statistically. For example is not currently possible to mathematically explain people’s behaviour, but there is statistical evidence and also accountability on an individual. Eg a doctor making a decision about a scan result.

It's even simpler than that. You don't need any particular level of understanding, you just can't lie about what your level of understanding is.

The following would seem to be OK: "This model performs well in a set of tests we devised, your mileage may vary."

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#196

Post by JoshCole »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #174
JoshCole wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first section is a decent summary. I read the first section and it doesn't seem to support your claim. In particular, it claims they have a mandate to protect consumers and links to another wiki entry on that topic. Within that wiki entry protection against misleading statements is mentioned as an aspect of protection of consumers. This seems to refute your claim of overreach, because in the blog post related t…

The first point was just pointing to a summary of their purpose, because the comment above had asked about their purpose. It wasn't in support of any claim - to be abundantly clear, the FTC is supposed to be regulating deceptive practice in business. The second was a statement that an informal blog post threatening citizens is inappropriate, and that the FTC has been accused by by insiders of engaging in inappropriat…

Thank you! I appreciate the abundance of clarity. It corrected a misconception I had about what you were saying.

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#197

Post by dcow »

Serious question: if I keep all known protected class information out of my pricing model, and it still decides to charge macOS users more for the product than Windows users, is it discrimination? Is it unfair? Now if I go and look at real outcomes and add back in the protected class information that was withheld from the model and run an analysis, and the results turn out to be post-facto biased, is it discrimination? Is it unfair?

Doe the FTC have an objective and consistent framework for evaluating this stuff?

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#199

Post by andrewmutz »

SoftAnnaLee wrote: post #86
flatline wrote: post #36

“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 be…

It makes sense to protect investors from falsely investing in new "AI" tech that isn't really new AI tech, but why do consumers need to be protected? If a software product solves their problem equally well with deep learning or with a more basic form of computation, why is the consumer harmed from false claims of AI?

To put it another way, if you found out that Chat GPT was implemented without any machine learning, and was just an elaborate creation of traditional software, would the consumer of the product have been harmed by false claims of AI?

Re: Keep your AI claims in check

#200

Post by [deleted] »

SoftAnnaLee wrote: post #86
flatline wrote: post #36

“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 be…

[deleted]
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