AI’s ability to learn poses challenge to regulators, companies: ‘A little bit scary’

A commissioner at the FTC says companies that develop AI systems won't be able to escape consumer liability by arguing that AI systems are unpredictable.

Bedoya was speaking to the International Association of Privacy Professionals about the tendency of generative AI systems to pick up knowledge and intuition about subjects even when programmers aren’t focusing on those topics. Bedoya said even some developers have said this is something that is "a little bit scary" about AI.

As an example, Bedoya noted that even though the second iteration of OpenAI's ChatGPT wasn’t fed that much information on how to translate English to French, it could do the job reasonably well. Some large language models like ChatGPT can also play chess, even though technical experts aren’t sure how it picked up that skill.