The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into OpenAI, the creator of the ChatGPT chatbot and DALL-E text-to-image generator.
The FTC sent a 20-page letter to OpenAI this week requesting information from the company about its security practices, steps it has taken to edit, supplement, or omit content from its datasets, and how she got the data from her models. trained on.
The letter was the first obtained by The Washington Post And confirmed by The New York Times.
“We have no comment,” FTC spokeswoman Juliana Gruenwald said in an email to Artnet News. “FTC investigations are not public, so we generally do not comment if we are investigating a particular matter.”
The letter did not specify that the investigation was limited to ChatGPT, a large language model that uses neural networks to generate text and is reinventing the way online search engines work.
Relevant to artists, the company also manufactures the DALL-E artificial intelligence image generator, first introduced in January 2021. AI image generators have rapidly gained popularity for their ease and accessibility , while spark anger for their more and more widespread use.
DALL-E and other AI art generators have also been criticized by artists, who claim that their art was used to train the models without their permission and thus violates their copyrights. In January, a class action lawsuit has been launched by a group of artists against the companies behind Midjourney, DreamUp and Stable Diffusion, alleging that these platforms violated copyright and unfair competition laws.
The FTC investigation could pose problems for OpenAI’s DALL-E product beyond ChatGPT, as the probe seeks information on “every large language model product” offered by the company.
In May, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee, where he urged lawmakers to regulate and “mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models”. He added: “I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go wrong. We want to work with the government to prevent this from happening.
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