FTC complaint urges a halt to GPT rollouts targeting OpenAI

There is a prominent tech ethics group that filed a complaint on Thursday with the US Federal Trade Commission, urging the regulator to intervene if it wishes to halt further commercial deployment of the latest generation of artificial intelligence technology found in the ChatGPT tool, which is a popular tool created by OpenAI Inc.

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Founded by longtime privacy advocate Marc Rotenberg, the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Policy filed a complaint against OpenAI's ChatGPT computer program, which simulates human conversations convincingly using GPT-4 as its latest language model. GPT-4 is the language model behind OpenAI's ChatGPT computer program. 

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There has been a request from the group for the FTC to open an investigation into OpenAI in order to determine if the commercial release of the fourth generation of the tool violates US and global regulations. As part of the global campaign to pause AI model training on GPT-4 for at least six months, Rotenberg and more than 1,000 other contributors signed an open letter on Wednesday. 

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The government needs to come up with a practical solution, and that solution comes from the Federal Trade Commission," Rotenberg said in a phone interview on Wednesday. "There is a need for them to enjoin OpenAI not to release any more of GPT until they are provided with adequate safeguards, which is precisely what we need them to do."

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In response to a request for comment, OpenAI did not immediately respond. FTC declined to comment on the matter. 

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Rotenberg's group submitted a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission for its investigation on Wednesday morning, calling on the FTC to open an inquiry and "make sure that the guardrails necessary to protect consumers, businesses, and the commercial marketplace are in place in order to protect them."

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According to a letter from AI experts on Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission has pledged to take a hard look at the burgeoning artificial intelligence industry in the near future. The FTC's Chair Lina Khan said at a conference this week that the agency is keeping a keen eye on developments in artificial intelligence in order to make sure that the dominant players in the field aren't able to dominate it. 

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There are a number of companies, including Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, that have been using artificial intelligence to enhance their products, with OpenAI being one of them. In response to a request for comment, Microsoft did not immediately respond.

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Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and founder of OpenAI, is among the signatories of the public letter. This highlights the growing rift between Musk and OpenAI. Musk previously supported the research group, but he was unable to maintain a positive relationship with the group after 2018.