Business and Labor Square Off Over AI’s Future in American Workplace

livemint.com:

The Federal Trade Commission’s investigation into the ChatGPT app points to an emerging conflict over how Washington should regulate artificial intelligence, one that could pit some of America’s biggest businesses against labor unions and progressive advocacy groups. Businesses want to use systems like ChatGPT, which can instantly generate media and imitate human conversation, to cut the number of employees needed to write documents or answer calls. AI-driven bots could also open up new markets by creating individually customized ads or even pitching customers in live conversation.

Labor unions, privacy advocates and consumer groups see AI’s potential benefits, too. But they fear that AI will eliminate jobs and downgrade working conditions. If an AI system were trained to persuade, bad actors could feed it a person’s private data and use it to manipulate or defraud, some warn.

Now,as the U.S. government takes its first tentative steps toward regulating AI, the Biden administration’s close ties to labor and progressive groups has some in business and tech concerned that the regulatory push will go too far, by stunting the development and use of a technology seen as crucial to powering the U.S. economy in the future.

Those fears were stoked by disclosure last week of the FTC probe of ChatGPT creator OpenAI. The agency is asking detailed questions about OpenAI’s policies for selling access to its AI systems to other businesses, among other topics. “The regulatory uncertainty and overreach that could come with such an approach would significantly hamstring America’s ability to compete and deploy societally beneficial uses of AI," said Jordan Crenshaw, a senior vice president at the U.S.