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.
There is no place to make informal threats in blog posts. It's not welcome at all.
Nobody said anything about enforcement activities. The FTC have all kinds of mechanisms to make it known what the rules are. Like, the rules themselves, notices, policy statements, what amounts to position papers, etc. This isn't kindergarten and the citizens of the united states aren't children. Blog posts with friendly tone and threats of punishment for ill-behavior simply isn't appropriate.
You can't put it in these terms and not have a moment to reflect on what's happening in our technology sphere. In particular in regard to CEOs of companies directly involved in these dubious AI claims where customer's life is on the line
I am deeply symapthic of the FTC's position in respect to trying to pass a message where common sense and formal communication have no effect.
It's important to put it in those terms even when there are bad actors, because there always will be. The US government isn't supposed to be our keeper, it's supposed to be of the people, by the people, for the people.
Aside from the problematic medium, claiming something uses AI or is AI or has AI isn't a specific claim with respect to what the product can or cannot do. A product can do X or not. Whether someone punched out 7 million lines of if/else statements or 7 lines of pytorch to approximate the 7 million lines of explicit code matters not. As such, a product making any claim of AI isn't actually a large problem, even if it is total bs. The fact that the current folks at the FTC don't appear to understand this suggests they are trying to regulate something they don't understand.
I'm not sure to understand your point on what the product can actually do: this whole blog entry is about sticking the marketing claims to reality, what exactly the product does, and not make vague promises because it uses AI.
Basically, outside of their tone, you seem to me 100% in agreement with the FTC's message here.
You are right in that the tone/medium of the message is the problematic issue.
But, even outside that, claiming something is/has/uses AI is practically meaningless. It's not a concrete claim, so consumers of said product aren't damaged by such claim. A claim of risk free returns of 50% causes harm. A false claim of curing cancer causes harm. So no, I'm not in agreement with it. The FTC should find more important things to spend the time of their 1100 people on, especially when they don't even seem to understand the topic at hand.
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 to guidance to companies the tone which is consistently struck again and again is that companies should not make misleading statements about AI capabilities. This is complete alignment with their mandate according to the link which you claimed was a decent summary. It also in alignment with the rest of the wiki, which covers topics like false advertising.
> 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.
The use of sequences of characters in digital spaces for the purposes of communication is not inherently inappropriate. This sequence of characters is on guidance for companies and requests they do not lie or make false claims about capabilities. This relates to their mandate, because they have a mandate to protect consumers from misleading statements. For example, lies about capabilities or false statements about capabilities made unknowingly under the presumption that models were more effective than they are.
> There are serious people quitting the FTC over current leadership, claiming they engaged in behavior that is wildly overstepping their legal authority.
Can you link to one of these people who are so serious they have quit making the claim that the FTC shouldn't provide guidance to companies via their government website at a URL under https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance for the purpose of discouraging companies from misleading consumers regarding the capabilities of their AI models?
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 inappropriate behavior on several fronts. Two FTC commissioners resigned recently (one making strong claims of illegal and inappropriate behavior in a WSJ oped), and the FTC's recent case against Meta was seen as an overstep by the relevant court.
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.