There’s no shortage of warnings that artificial intelligence will displace workers, risk undermining democracy, and, if left unchecked, potentially overpower its human creators. But a much more immediate risk of A.I.’s rapidly accelerating scale could be that the technology will overwhelmingly benefit only a handful of powerful actors, according to Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission and one of the country’s loudest voices against corporate anti-competitiveness. And she’s already on the case.
A.I. as a widely available commercial product only really entered the public consciousness in November last year, when OpenAI released its hugely popular A.I.-powered ChatGPT. But Khan and the FTC are already seeing issues related to the nascent technology that threaten to undermine fair competition and harm consumers, she wrote in a guest essay published in the New York Times Wednesday.
