Kelly Armstrong Warns 'We're Massively Inadequately Prepared' To Address AI Copyright Enforcement

3 months ago

During a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing, Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) questioned FTC Chair Lina Khan and the FTC Commissioners about AI development, and the cooperation between legislation and rulemaking to protect data and copyrights from AI abuses.

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Transcript

00:00I actually had a whole line of questioning on something, but something Ms. Castor just said,

00:05I may ask all five of you this question, because I think it's fairly important.

00:10You just said there's no indefinite retention on AI, and we're not going to exclude that, correct,

00:17Chairman Khan? Under COPPA, for certain entities in certain contexts. So my question is,

00:24is once information is generated into AI, how is it not retained permanently?

00:32So you mean, basically, how can you require unlearning from the model?

00:35Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great question.

00:37As far as we know, it's not possible, and that's why timely action is incredibly important,

00:43and making sure firms are not, in the first instance, able to use unlawfully collected data

00:49to train their AI. It also, your point raises another issue, which is business could face an

00:55incentive to actually play fast and loose with the rules, because their monetary gain from that,

01:02and the value they'll generate from training their AI could be so important. And so,

01:06for all of these reasons, stronger rules of the road are going to be critical.

01:10I'm going to ask the two new commissioners one at a time their thoughts on this, because I think

01:14this is the next big conversation. Anybody's heard me talk about this, whether it's government

01:18related, Fourth Amendment related, privately related. If you have a 16-year-old daughter

01:23and a 14-year-old son, privacy in the 21st century is going to be the conversation we have,

01:30and how we monetize all of these things. So what tools do you need from us?

01:38Well, and to your question on what do you do once that data is captured, it's an interesting

01:42question. I'd say, I mean, these emerging technologies, we don't fully understand

01:46exactly what they're capable of, but I think what's interesting is I think there'll be more

01:51technologies that may help us in terms of fighting some of these issues. The FTC's work on the voice

01:57cloning challenge is a great example of where we're concerned about voice cloning, the use of AI,

02:03where you have fraudsters using calling of grandmas and saying, this is your grandson

02:08using a voice clone, and worried about that. So the agency, we just had a voice cloning challenge

02:14where we had companies come in and say, what can we do to fight this? And they provided different

02:19technologies that could help assess that. And I think the same is possible with these types of

02:24issues where you're going to have, we're going to see these types of problems arise in the markets.

02:31I think we'll also see solutions arise too. And I think we can let the markets develop and

02:36understand where those, with constantly assessing where the markets are, remaining vigilant,

02:42using the tools that we have to address the concerns that they have when there are unfair and

02:47deceptive trade practices and, or if there's competition issues as well.

02:51And I know when we talked, coming in, we talked about the Ticket Act, and one of the things that

02:55concerns me about AI is somehow it's the enforcement, right? If you use five other

03:00songs to create a song, you have to pay royalties for it. We all know if you don't, you get sued,

03:06and if you can prove it, you end up losing on a royalty case. There's famous ones. My concern is,

03:11we don't know the five inputs, and there's this fight between open source and non-open source.

03:17And so I don't want to live in a world where every musician is created by AI.

03:22I don't think you get Nirvana in 1991 off of Motley Crue in 1987. I think AI is pretty smart.

03:29I don't think it's smart enough to do that. I also think by the time we get around to regulating it,

03:34or legislating on it in a meaningful way, the technology is going to be so far past us

03:39that we're... I mean, there's very few times, and I can say that up here, because the Music

03:43Modernization Act became law before I got here, and it's actually worked. It's not perfect in the

03:50new environment, but it was originally started to be written under Napster and LimeWire and all of

03:55those things, and it still exists. But I mean, what different enforcement challenges do you see

04:00moving forward in this space, Mr. Ferguson? So the commission's got its suite of statutes

04:06that it enforces, and most of them are relatively old, and they're very old compared to AI.

04:11And the stuff that you're talking about involve these massive trade-offs between

04:16promoting the innovation... I mean, look, AI will be a super important tool for new challengers to

04:21come and challenge big tech incumbency, and we don't want regulators sort of strangling that

04:26in the cradle early on. At the same time, tremendous risks are associated with AI. But

04:31these are like huge political sort of national economic trade-offs that Congress needs to make

04:36afresh. It can't be that the agencies take these statutes from the 1910s and 1930s and tries to

04:42sort of fit AI into that system. Congress has to tell us, or whichever agencies they're going to

04:48empower to do this enforcing, how to do these trade-offs. Well, and I think one of the first

04:52questions we have to answer, which is really actually hard, is how do we define open source?

04:57Open source is very different now than it was five years ago. I mean, if you can get a song

05:02online and feed it into an AI generator, I can't play that song at my business without paying

05:08royalties. But once I put it into an AI generator, I don't know. And I mean, so I understand the

05:12regulatory side of it. I just... I'm very concerned about how we actually... You all do it, and we do

05:19it, how you actually figure out a mechanism to enforce it. Because stealing something and making

05:24something not original your own is... I mean, we have the rules in place. We just don't... I don't

05:30know if we're... I think we're massively inadequately prepared to enforce it. And with

05:34that, I yield back. Okay. All right. Now...

Kelly Armstrong Warns 'We're Massively Inadequately Prepared' To Address AI Copyright Enforcement

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