The Capitol Hill hearings featuring TikTok's CEO lead off episode 450 of the Cyberlaw Podcast. The CEO handled the endless stream of Congressional accusations and suspicion about as well as could have been expected. And it did him as little good as a cynic would have expected. Jim Dempsey and Mark MacCarthy think Congress is moving toward action on Chinese IT products – probably in the form of the bipartisan Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act. But passing legislation and actually doing something about China's IT successes are two very different things.
The FTC is jumping into the policy arena on cloud services, Mark tells us, and it can't escape its DNA; it's dwelling on possible industry concentration and lock-in and not asking much about the national security implications of knocking off a bunch of American cloud providers when the alternatives are largely Chinese cloud providers. The FTC's myopia means that the administration won't get as much help as it could from the FTC on cloud security measures. I reissue my standard objection to the FTC's refusal to follow the FCC's lead in deferring on national security to executive branch concerns. Mark and I disagree about whether the FTC Act requires the Commission to limit itself to consumer protection.
Jim Dempsey reviews the latest AI releases, including Google's Bard, which seems to have many of the same hallucination problems as OpenAI's. Jim and I debate what I consider the wacky and unjustified fascination in the press with catching AI engaging in wrongthink. I believe it's just a mechanism for justifying the imposition of left-wing values on AI output – which already scores left/libertarian on 14 of 15 standard tests for identifying ideological affiliation. Similarly, I question the effort to stop AI from hallucinating footnotes in support of its erroneous facts. If ever there were a case for a separate AI citechecker, for generative AI correction of AI errors, the fake citation problem seems like a natural.
