Open AI’s smash-hit chatbot, ChatGPT, is being investigated by The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over fears its spreading misinformation to users.
The US regulators penned a letter to the ChatGPT maker asking for clarity on how it mitigates the risks of generating “statements about real individuals that are false, misleading, disparaging or harmful.”
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that his company is working with the FTC but expressed his disappointment at discovering the probe via a leak, which was first reported in The Washington Post.
“That said, it’s super important to us that our technology is safe and pro-consumer, and we are confident we follow the law. Of course we will work with the FTC,” Altman wrote on Twitter.
The CEO claimed his company built GPT-4, the LLM that powers ChatGPT “on top of years of safety research”.
“We protect user privacy and design our systems to learn about the world, not private individuals,” Altman added.
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By GlobalDataMicrosoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT has risen to prominence in the mainstream since its launch last year. The application’s ability to respond with human-like responses and generate masses of information has taken the technology world by storm.
The popularity of the generative AI chatbot spurred others in the industry to release their own versions quickly – all of which have been scrutinised under the same risks. Google’s generative AI offering Bard infamously provided a false piece of information in its demo.
However, it’s been reported that ChatGPT saw its monthly traffic to plummet in June for the first time since its launch in November 2022, according to web analytics company Similarweb.
Total monthly visits during 2023 declined to 1.6 billion visits in June from 1.75 billion visits in April and 1.8 billion visits in May.
Early data for the month of July also indicates that the downward trend is set to continue.
The FTC is also reportedly investigating how the ChatGPT maker is obtaining data to train its large language models (LLMs).
It follows a lawsuit against OpenAI by high-profile actor Sarah Silverman, who claims the two technology firms have used her copyrighted work to train its AI systems.
Silverman alleges that ChatGPT is able to summarise her published books when prompted.
The lawsuit claims that the chatbot is not concerned with “[reproducing] any of the copyright management information Plaintiffs included with their published works.”
