Can the FTC create a level playing for AI?

A fantastic interview in The Wall Street Journal with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Lina Khan on the role of her agency and the government in regulating the current artificial intelligence landscape highlights how many of the companies involved are clearly stifling competition with a view to creating monopolies.

The full interview lasts about 23 minutes, including three questions at the end, but is well worth watching in its entirety. Throughout, Khan insists that the age of “move fast and break things” — whereby AI companies take whatever information they want to train their models without asking for permission or without adequate compensation — is over, pointing out that this behavior leaves many companies that have possibly invested a lot to get that data with no options in the face of models that, in many cases, can put them out of business.

Similarly, some companies cannot be allowed to use personal or corporate data to train their models or simply take it through queries to their algorithms by their users, because this is a threat to privacy; at the same time, neither can these companies simply tell users “if you don’t want us to take your data, then don’t use our algorithm” regardless of whether they they say in their terms of service, because this will deny people access to a technology with significant potential that has…