UK Regulator: AI’s ‘Positive Future’ Isn’t a Guarantee

The U.K.’s competition regulator thinks artificial intelligence can have a positive impact — when managed correctly.

“There is real potential for this technology to turbo charge productivity and make millions of everyday tasks easier — but we can’t take a positive future for granted,” Sarah Cardell, chief executive officer of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), said in a news release Monday (Sept. 18).

That’s the thinking behind the CMA’s new report proposing regulations governing foundational models (FMs), artificial intelligence (AI) systems with broad capabilities that can be adapted to a range of specific purposes.

It comes as a number of governments around the world work to govern AI as the technology continues to grow.

As the CMA argues in the release, the rapid development of FMs across applications like ChatGPT underline their potential to change how people work and live, and to transform a variety of industries.

However, Cardell said, there is still “a real risk that the use of AI develops in a way that undermines consumer trust or is dominated by a few players who exert market power that prevents the full benefits being felt across the economy.”

The CMA is proposing a number of guiding principles for AI developers, such as accountability, access, choice, fair dealing and transparency.

The report warns that if competition is weak or developers ignore regulation, people and businesses could be hurt.

“For example, people could be exposed to significant levels of false and misleading information and AI-enabled fraud,” the release said. “In the longer term, a handful of firms could use FMs to gain or entrench positions of market power and fail to offer the best products and services and/or charge high prices.”

As PYMNTS wrote last week, it’s not just governments that feel trepidation about AI, as consumers see both the risk and the promise of the technology.

Although many consumers see AI as something that can improve their lives, there’s still an undercurrent of the unknown in their view of it, based around doubts that AI will give them the right information 100% of the time.

Consumers also feel uncertain about whether the information AI platforms provide is safe and reliable, especially in sensitive areas like banking and healthcare.

“What is key for most consumers is knowing that [AI] goes well beyond just a large language model [LLM], it goes well beyond what you’re sort of seeing at the surface, and it’s been touching and permeating a lot of parts of your daily lives for years,” Shaunt Sarkissian, founder and CEO of AI-ID, told PYMNTS in a recent interview.